6. Size of the Internet
6.1 Computers on the Internet
The data presented in this and the next section covers the number of hosts (computers) permanently connected to the Internet in New Zealand, and the size of the New Zealand domain which gives one indication of the number of organisations connected. The prime source of information about hosts connected to the Internet is Network Wizards.
Changes to the number of "hosts" (computers) on the Internet is regarded as an indicator of the rate of growth of the Internet. To be counted as a host, a computer must have its own Internet address and be permanently and directly connected to the Internet. Home or small business computers which connect by dialling up to a service provider are therefore not counted. Consequently, it is reasonable to assume that there are many more Internet users than hosts, possibly by a factor of five or more. To stress this point: the information presented here refers to the number of computers permanently wired into the Internet in New Zealand, it does not purport to describe directly the number of individuals using the Internet.
Data relating to Internet users and usage should be treated with caution due to the evolving nature of the Internet, the variety of ways it can be accessed and the difficulty in gathering reliable data. Over the last several years, information collected by Network Wizards has become less reliable because an increasing proportion of organisations now restrict access to their domain data. Because of this, Network Wizards introduced a new survey technique in July 1997. Network Wizards have provided "adjusted" host counts for earlier years of the survey to enable comparisons to be made. For a full explanation of the changes to the survey visit the Network Wizards web site at http://www.nw.com/.
A more serious problem with collecting this information is due to an increasing trend for corporate networks to be screened off from the Internet behind firewalls. This means that a private network with hundreds or even thousands of computers may appear to the outside world as just one or two host computers. Unfortunately, the new methodology employed by Network Wizards does nothing to overcome the problem of networks being screened behind firewalls.
Figure 6.1.1 shows the growth in the number of hosts connected to the Internet worldwide, from July 1991 through to January 1999. A line has been added showing the revised total host counts for the earlier surveys.
Use of a logarithmic scale allows the number of hosts with domain names ending in .nz to be graphed alongside the world-wide data despite the substantial difference in the actual numbers. Note that an exponential curve plots as a straight line when a logarithmic scale is used.
Figure 6.1.1 Growth in Internet hosts - New Zealand (.nz) and the world
The graph shows a continuous exponential increase in the number of Internet hosts worldwide. The number of hosts in New Zealand has also increased rapidly although it appeared to plateau from 1996 to 1997 and actually fell in 1998.
As other information detailed below shows, use of the Internet in New Zealand is continuing to increase rapidly and the apparent fall in host numbers in 1998 indicates that this now a less useful measure of Internet activity in New Zealand. The reasons for the anomaly is not clear but it may be due at least in part to the growing use of firewalls which screen the actual number of computers on corporate Intranets from external scrutiny, and thus could be interpreted as representing a maturation of the use of the Internet in New Zealand.
Figures 6.1.2 and 6.1.3 show relative statistics for ten countries with the highest Internet host counts by population. The first is based on Network Wizards statistics and population statistics taken from the US Census Bureau, and the second on OECD figures for July 1998 (OECD 1999). Despite the different basis for the statistics, the same ten countries are involved.
Figure 6.1.2 shows changes in the number of hosts per 1000 people since January 1996. The numbers need to be treated with some caution, partly for the reasons outlined above. The unexplained dip in growth observed for .nz hosts in Figure 6.1.1 is also apparent for several other countries, for example, US, Finland, Iceland and Norway.
Data graphed in Figure 6.1.2 is based on the assumption that, except for the US, the number of hosts for each country can be derived from registrations in the country code top level domains (ccTLDs) and that for comparative purposes registrations from different countries in the generic top level domains (gTLDs) can be neglected. Examples of ccTLDs are .nz for New Zealand (see Section 6.2), .au for Australia and .ca for Canada. The most important gTLD, used world-wide for commercial organisations, is .com. The US figures are based on registrations in the generic top level domains, or gTLDs as well as .us. From July 1998, the number of registrations in the open gTLDs (.com, .net and .org) attributed to the US have been reduced allowing for the fact that at that date approximately 24% of such registrations were from outside the US (OECD 1999). It is likely that the proportion of such non-US registrations has increased in the 18 months since July 1998 and therefore that US registrations are increasingly overestimated from January 1999 onwards.
Figure 6.1.2 Number of Internet hosts per 1000 population
Figure 6.1.3 shows that the assumptions underlying the graphs in Figure 6.1.2 lead, at best, to a very rough approximation to the actual distribution of Internet hosts. Figure 6.1.3 is based on OECD data as of July 1998 (OECD 1999) and shows the same ten countries but differs in one significant respect in that it includes information about the apparent number of hosts in each country registered in the gTLDs as well as ccTLDs. The chart shows both the ccTLD and gTLD host counts for each country.
Figure 6.1.3 Top ten OECD countries by hosts per 1000 population (July 1998)
Inclusion of the gTLDs alters the relative ordering, but not the membership, of the top ten group of countries. Compared with the ccTLD-based statistics in Figure 6.1.2, at July 1998 New Zealand was in seventh place (compared with fifth) and Australia in ninth (compared with sixth). Two countries with a proportionately large number of hosts registered in the gTLDs, Canada and Sweden, have moved ahead of New Zealand, and another, Denmark, ahead of Australia.
One reason for the wide variability between countries with registrations in the gTLDs is that there are no restrictions on who may register in the commercially important .com domain, while there is a wide range of registration policies amongst the ccTLDs with some restricted to residents only and others being completely unregulated
6.2 Domain Name Registrations
The data in this section is derived from figures compiled by Mark Davies of Victoria University of Wellington (Davies) and the OECD (OECD 1999).
When an organisation connects to the Internet, it typically registers a "domain name". The numbers of New Zealand organisations connected to the Internet is estimated by counting the registered domain names in the .nz country code top level domain. Each third level New Zealand domain, for example name.co.nz, that has been registered is assumed to belong to a separate organisation be it a company, school, non-profit organisation or government department etc. Sub-domains are not counted, thus moc.govt.nz is counted but comms.moc.govt.nz is not.
The figures can be taken only as indicative of Internet activity rather than providing firm information about the number of organisations linking to the Internet in New Zealand. There are few restrictions on who may register in the .nz domain, especially the most popular subdomains .co.nz (commercial organisations) .org.nz and .net.nz. Some organisations have multiple registrations and some registrations are from overseas. Conversely, many New Zealand organisations have registrations in other domains, especially the generic top level domains (gTLDs), such as .com. According to the New Zealand Registry (Domainz), the number of off-shore registrations in .nz is around 5% of the total, and which is roughly equivalent to the number of New Zealand registrations in the gTLDs (see Section 6.1).
Figure 6.2.1 shows the total number of network connected organisations as a time series since July 1994. There has been strong growth in the registering of domains in New Zealand, particularly over the last five years. At 1 February 2000, there were 49,250 registered domain names in the .nz domain.
Figure 6.2.1 New Zealand Internet Domains
6.3 Types of Organisation on the Internet
Organisations are normally allocated domain names according to organisation type, with the penultimate part of a name (or second level domain), such as the "co" in <name.co.nz> used to categorise domains. The following second level domains are used in New Zealand:
| Second Level Domain | Normally Used By: |
| ac.nz | Tertiary educational institutions |
| co.nz | Companies |
| cri.nz | Crown Research Institutes |
| gen.nz | Individuals and organisations which do not fit the other categories |
| govt.nz | Central government agencies and local and regional councils |
| iwi.nz | Iwi organisations |
| mil.nz | Military organisations |
| net.nz | Internet Service Providers |
| org.nz | Non-profit organisations and incorporated societies |
| school.nz | Schools |
Note that the table represents customary usage and registering organisations free to choose between several secondary level domains. For example, ISPs have been registered in .ac.nz, .gen.nz and .co.nz as well as .net.nz. While there is provision for individuals to have domain names of their own in the .gen.nz domain, most do not. Therefore numbers of domains registered is not a good indicator of individuals using the Internet.
Figure 6.3.1 shows the split of commercial (.co.nz) to non-commercial organisations (all other second level domain names registered).
Figure 6.3.1 Commercial vs non-commercial domains
Most of the increase in registered domain names is due to the registration of commercial domains, which have increased from 2,551 to over 43,000 in four years. There has also been strong growth in the numbers of non-commercial domains registered.
Figure 6.3.2 shows the annual growth rate of the registration of commercial domain names. The annual growth rate peaked in April 1996 at 616% when registrations were below 3,000, and fell off steadily, to 63% in 1998. Since then the annual growth rate has increased steadily, reaching 83% in February 2000.
Figure 6.3.2 Commercial registrations on the Internet in New Zealand
Figure 6.3.3 shows the growth in the non-commercial domains. The "all others" category includes .govt.nz, .ac.nz, .cri.nz which were most significant in the early years of Internet development but are relatively less significant now. Also included are .iwi.nz and .mil.nz, both with very low numbers of registrations. The relatively rapid increase in registrations in .org,nz shows increasing interest in the Internet by non-profit and community organisations. In recent years there has also been increasing use of the Internet by schools as shown by the growth in .school.nz (to 740 in February 2000).
Figure 6.3.3 Non-commercial registrations on the Internet in New Zealand
6.4 Organisations with World-Wide Web Sites
The number of organisations with a World-wide Web site gives a better measure of the actual numbers of organisations actively involved in the Internet than does the number of domain names registered. Organisations will most commonly have just one Web site even if they have registered several domain names. The number of Web sites is estimated by counting all the domain names with the format: www.name.domain.nz. However, this only gives an estimate of the number of Web sites, as it over counts organisations using more than one address, excludes Web sites which to not start with "www" and does not take into account non-active Web sites.
Figure 6.4.1 shows the total number of sites in the .nz domain split into commercial (co.nz) Web sites and non-commercial Web sites estimated in this way from February 1997 to February 2000. There were 25,342 Web sites in .nz as of February 2000 of which 21,923 or 87% have been set up by commercial organisations. Overall there was an increase of 75% in Web sites over the year from February 1999.
Figure 6.4.1 New Zealand (.nz) WWW sites
As noted in section 6.2, many organisations register names in the generic top level domains (such as .com), rather than country code top level domains such as .nz. Figure 6.4.2 shows the numbers of Web servers per 1000 population in the top 12 OECD countries, along with the OECD average (OECD 1999). The distribution pattern is significantly different from the host distribution shown in Figure 6.1.3, and probably gives a more accurate picture of actual Internet use by organisations in the different countries, with New Zealand just above the OECD average.
Figure 6.4.2 Web servers per 1000 population (OECD countries, July 1998)
Electronic commerce activity is probably best measured by the number of sites which provide secure services on the Web. The OECD report includes information collected by Netcraft (http://www.netcraft.co.uk/) about the numbers of secure Web sites with third party certification suitable for encrypted credit card transactions over the Internet. Note that, unlike statistics which rely on domain names for an indication of country, Figure 6.4.3 is based on the actual geographic address of the business.
New Zealand has a comparatively high level of use of secure server by international standards, but a relatively low annual level of growth (74%) compared with the OECD average (128%).
Figure 6.4.3 Secure Web servers for electronic commerce (August 1998)
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