Dotcom turns 25 today

 

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Posted on 15 Mar 2010 at 11:09

Twenty five years ago today, the first dotcom name was registered by Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1985, a further five companies jumped on the dotcom bandwagon, which travelled at a snail's pace - it took 12 years for the one millionth dotcom domain name to be registered.

This was largely because the web wasn't popularised until Netscape's Mosaic web browser was introduced in April 1993. Today, more than 668,000 dotcom domains are registered each month and it's fair to say they've become a massive part of our daily lives.

"This birthday is really significant because what we are celebrating here is the internet and dotcom is a good, well known placeholder for the rest of the internet," said Mark McLaughlin, CEO of VeriSign, the company responsible for looking after the dotcom domain.

"Who would have guessed 25 years ago where the internet would be today. This really was a groundbreaking event," he said.

21 million domains had been registered by the turn of the century and another 57 million domains were registered in the last ten years.

These days, people go to dotcom websites to shop, socialise, be entertained and to learn new things. It's estimated that a quarter of the world's population - 1.7 billion people - now use the internet.

VeriSign's CEO doesn't see this figure slowing down over the next 25 years, either. "I think that the way we access information today, mostly still through PCs and laptops is highly likely to change; that the voice will be more important than text input. I think the whole fabric of how we access, search, find and get information is going to be radically different."

The firm logs 53 million requests for websites every day - the same as what was handled in the whole of 1995 - and McLaughlin expects that to rise to somewhere between three and four quadrillion (3 to 4,000 billion) by 2020.

Part of this growth is likely to come from the liberalisation of the internet, where the domain name market will be opened up completely. No longer will you just be limited to registering .com, .co.uk (and other) domain extensions, and instead you'll be able to register domains with .anything. This raises some interesting questions and implications, which are still being discussed. ICANN, the company who governs the internet, hasn't said exactly when liberalisation will start, but it's expected to happen in the first half of this year.