The internet grew at a rate of 22% in the past year, according to a report released by VeriSign, which administers the Internet’s major .com and .net DNS servers.

The report measures the growth based on the number of domain registrations received by top-level domain names.

The most popular domains in terms of base size are .com, .de, .cn, .net, .uk, .org, .info, .nl (Netherlands) and .eu (the European Union). While .com accounted for around 40% of all registrations, this trend looks to be decreasing as registrations increasingly separate by country.

The VeriSign report estimated that 8.5% of all new domain name registrations were registered with the intent of generating online advertising revenue.

In response to a claim in April by Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for US telecoms giant AT&T, that the internet was reaching capacity, VeriSign said it was increasing its DNS query capacity from 400 billion queries a day to four trillion and would boost the bandwidth of its proprietary constellation of resolution systems from 20 gigabits per second to over 200Gbps.

Calling its plan ‘Project Titan’, VeriSign said it also intended to distribute its infrastructure across more than 100 locations worldwide in an effort to improve Internet traffic flow and counter region-specific cyber-attacks.

“Securing and protecting the integrity of DNS is critical to the stability of the global Internet, and VeriSign is continuing to make investments that improve the scalability and fortification of this critical infrastructure,” said Raynor Dahlquist, senior vice president of Naming Services.