Dot.com TLD celebrates 25th anniversary

On March 15, 1985, the American company Symbolics Computers registered the domain name symbolics.com. With that registration, the first domain name on the internet was a fact, exactly 25 years ago on Monday.

The Symbolics domain name was registered with Verisign, but initially there was little interest in the business community for a .com domain name. The list of the first hundred registered .com domain names therefore mainly includes computer companies, including IBM, Sun, Intel, AMD and Apple.

Domain names were not very popular until at least the mid-1990s, but with the arrival of the Mosaic web browser, the Internet became accessible and usable for the general public, and a run for .com domain names ensued. Between 1985 and 2000, 21 million .com addresses were purchased. Between 2000 and 2010, there were 57 million. Of the estimated 250 million websites with a domain name, more than 80 million are under the .com TLD.

Moreover, more money was put on the table for commercially attractive addresses every year. In 2006, Sex.com was sold for a record $14 million and the domain will soon be up for auction again. Currently, 668,000 .com domain names are registered monthly.

More than 1.7 billion people worldwide now have access to the internet. This number will continue to grow strongly in the coming years, partly due to emerging markets such as Brazil, China and India. As a result, the demand for .com addresses will continue. However, it is expected that, due to a more flexible attitude of the Icann, the number of available TLDs will also increase, which will also increase the freedom of choice.