The .info domain was launched in September 2001. It was the first of seven new top level domains chosen by ICANN in November 2000 to relieve congestion in the top level domain space dominated by .com, and achieved over half a million registrations in the first 90 days of its operation.
According to Afilias, the biggest sector of growth for .info has been in Europe which accounts for 52% of global registrations, followed by North America at 39%. Other registrants come from Asia-Pacific (7%) and Africa and Latin America (1%).
Afilias also claims that over 265,000 of the one million registered .info names have sites that are already live and open to visitors, compared with about 35% of active .com sites.
The majority of .info web addresses have been registered through German company Schlund + Partner. The second biggest registrar for .info is VeriSign.