Anybody care to explain the values in that chart? It says there are 332,395 level 2 domains under .net and 2,705,157 under .com. Perhaps the chart is quite old?<p>E.g. <a href="http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/" rel="nofollow">http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/</a> gives different values: 13,100,186 registered .net domains and 87,707,437 .com domains.<p>In any case, I think .com clearly outweighs .net in terms of registered domains. Hostnames don't really matter anything.
.net doesn't mean anything these days. .com is still mostly limited to companies (that is, .com, .org, .edu and .mil partition the space of real-world organizations), but .net has always meant "a <i>computer</i> network", which, these days, could be attached to any or none of these organization types. ISPs have never really favored .net over .com either. (They stick their users' IPs' reverse-resolution names under a <provider>.net domain, but they could just as easily put them under the .com, since they always already own it as well.)<p>I really wish all the current .net registrations could be shunted into the .com namespace, and then .net redefined to mean <i>social</i> networks. That is, every .net domain would be expected to have a public Diaspora/other social-networking-mesh-server running, in the same way that every .com is expected to have a public web server running.
<a href="http://www.registrarstats.com/Public/TLDDomainCounts.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.registrarstats.com/Public/TLDDomainCounts.aspx</a><p>I don't know where these numbers come from (original article) but they are wrong or I've misunderstood their meaning.
That makes plenty of sense to me based on what they used to mean. Nowadays, most people seem to think of the domain as the part they put into the browser to see your web page.