ISC terminates long-running IPv4 Domain Survey, looks towards IPv6

Internet Domain Survey - Since 1981

Since 1981, the Internet Domain Survey has been made and the results published quarterly. Despite its name, it is not a survey of domains; it is a survey of the use of IPv4 internet addresses. The Domain Survey has been managed and distributed by Internet Systems Consortium since 1994. A year-by-year comparison of survey results shows the rapid growth of internet addresses in use. The results, along with a summary graph, have been released here on our site.

Survey Measures IPv4 Only

Over the last few years, the rate of growth measured by the Domain Survey has slowed. This is because (as IPv4 space is exhausted) Internet growth is now dominated by IPv6 growth and private networks, neither of which can be measured by our survey. The 40-year-old Domain Survey predates by a couple of decades the production use of IPv6. The growth of IPv4 is slowing, but the growth of the Internet is not. We believe that the numbers in our venerable Domain Survey are now too misleading for us to distribute them responsibly.

ISC Retiring the Survey

ISC is retiring the Domain Survey because we believe that its results are increasingly misleading, since they do not include IPv6. We believe that it is better to declare the Domain Survey to be a historical artifact rather than offer explanations for its puzzling numbers.

Historical Data Remains

We have turned off the data collector. All of the historical Domain Survey data remains available at https://www.isc.org/survey/. We will not gather new data, but the historical data is still useful and interesting.