Web War I: Every GI Joe has an IP place to go

The latest counts for Internet domain names by Network Wizards show that in July, the UK (with 1,190,663 hosts) had overtaken Germany, and moved to seventh place. Of the domain suffixes, .com was first with more than 10 million, then .net with 7 million, then .edu with 4 million. The surprise at number four position is the US military, with 1.359 million, just ahead of Japan. That must mean that every US military person has a domain name. Since the business of the military is making or stopping war, it makes you wonder what would happen to the Web in times of a major war. At number six position is .us, which is a little surprising as the USA is mostly .com land. After .uk and .de, there is .ca, .au, .org and .gov. There's good ammunition for anarchists here: there are apparently around 650,000 .gov hosts registered -- and no doubt the taxpayers are paying to train Webmasters and Webmistresses to get better paid jobs in the private sector. There were 37,739,000 hosts worldwide at the end of July, up 24 per cent from January 1998. The fastest increases were in .net (growing at 34 per cent in this period, and com up 26 per cent), with .australia and .education being the slowest growers, at 13 per cent in the period. ®