Internet Diffusion & Internet Domains: Looking for a new Metric. The Case of Registrations by Italian Individuals

This paper reports about the analysis of the Internet diffusion among families and business basing on daily observations on registrations of second level domain names underneath the “.it” ccTLD . In particular, domains registered by individuals are analysed. The penetration rate over the relevant population of potential adopters is computed at highly disaggregated geographical level (province). A concentration analysis is carried out to investigate whether the geographical distribution of Internet is less concentrated than population and income suggesting a diffusive effect. Regression analysis is carried out using demographic, social, economic and infrastructure indicators. Finally we briefly describe the further developments of our research. At the present we are building a database containing domains registered by firms in addition to domains registered by individuals. The idea is to use the database in order to check for the existence of power laws both in the number of domains registered in each province and in the number of domains registered by each firm.