Norway has been in the forefront on digital services for quite a long time. However, when major parts of society were forced to work from home, services and infrastructure were tested as never before.
Norid operates the domain name services (DNS) for the Norwegian top-level domain, which is part of the basic Internet infrastructure. The service is absolutely necessary for Norwegian domain names to work technically. It is well known that scammers know how to exploit a crisis situation, and we have therefore carefully monitored our services over the last months. Luckily we have not registered any type of irregular load. The number of DNS look-ups of Norwegian domain names is normally around 700 millions per day, and this level has remained stable these last months.
The number of domain name registrations has stayed the same
Several European top-level domain registries have experienced a growth in new domain names during the corona crisis. CENTR, The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries, reports a 20 per cent growth in new domain names in April 2020 compared to April 2019[1]. They assume that the reason probably is that many small businesses have been forced to establish themselves online in order to continue business when their physical shop was closed down.
The activity in domain name registrations in Norway has remained normal during the latest months despite the fact that many businesses have been closed, with little or no activity over several weeks. We also notice that our collaborating partners, the Norwegian Industrial Property Office and The Register of Business Enterprises/Altinn are experiencing a rush. People with start-up ideas are clearly not sitting on their hands waiting for better times. The impression is supported by the fact that we have had more requests than normal from businesses who want to become providers of Norwegian domain names.
[1] https://centr.org/news/blog/is-the-lockdown-driving-domain-registrations.html