New Delhi, Mar 1 (IANS): Nearly 2.3 million domain name registrations were added to the internet in the fourth quarter of 2016, bringing the total number of domain name registrations to 329.3 million, a new report revealed on Wednesday.

According to VeriSign, a global leader in domain names and internet security, the total number of domain name registrations are across all top-level domains (TLDs), as of December 31 last year.

"The increase of approximately 2.3 million domain name registrations globally equates to a growth rate of 1.8 percent over the third quarter of 2016. Domain name registrations have grown by 21 million, or 6.8 percent, year over year," the report titled 'Domain Name Industry Brief' said.

The .com and .net TLDs had a combined total of approximately 142.2 million domain name registrations in the domain name base in the fourth quarter of 2016. This represents a 1.7 percent increase year over year.

"As of December 31, the .com domain name base equaled 126.9 million domain name registrations, while the .net domain name base equaled 15.3 million domain name registrations," the report added.

New .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 8.8 million during the fourth quarter of 2016. In the fourth quarter of 2015, new .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 12.2 million.

During the fourth quarter of 2016, Verisign's average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was approximately 143 billion queries per day across all TLDs operated by Verisign, with a peak of nearly 398 billion queries.