One of the most important tasks when starting to write the history of a national web like ‘the Danish web’ is to identify the outer borders of the object of study. In the present case one of the ways of doing this is to delimit the Danish web by the so-called ‘country-code Top-Level Domain’ (ccTLD), in the present case .dk. Therefore, getting access to historical lists of the domain names that were registered on .dk year by year between 1992 and 2000 is very important. However, finding and accessing these ccTLD lists is by no means straight forward. In short: they cannot be found as such, but they have to be reconstructed.
A first step in reconstructing these lists was to find out if the national domain name registrar still had the old lists or not. The handler of domain names on .dk is now Punktum.dk, until recently named dk-hostmaster. Therefore, I had a fruitful meeting with Punktum.dk earlier in the Spring, and they were very helpful. The good news is that some information was available for me, the bad news that complete lists of all the domain names on .dk had not been preserved. In following blog posts I’ll inform more about how I intend to reconstruct these historical domain name lists, and how the work progresses.
Dansk Internet Forum (DIFO) is the association that has administered the Danish part of the internet since 1 July 1999, and DIFO owns Punktum dk, which administers all the danish .dk domain names. This Spring DIFO could celebrate its 25th anniversary, and in relation to that a book was published, Hele Danmarks .dk — Internettes vej til danskerne (‘Denmarks .dk — How the Internet made its way to Denmark’), the book can be downloaded as ebook (in Danish or English), or as an audio book (Danish only).
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