Happy Birthday Dot Com

Twenty-five years ago, Charles Horning was the first man to register a .com domain name for his company, Symbolics. It was over a month before the second was registered and only three more were registered that year. Today, there are almost 90 million .coms, with half a million new ones added every week. VeriSign, the .com registry, handles over 50 billion DNS queries every day. It's difficult to imagine an internet without it.

But there very nearly wasn't a .com at all. Draft specs published in May 1984 called for a “.cor”, for anything corporate-related. The same draft called for a “.pub”. By July, these had morphed into .com and .org, but nobody seems to know why.

Paul Mockapetris, who invented the DNS said. “Back then none of this seemed important,” he said. “We set up .com so we could split off commercial issues and have all that dealt with separately. At the time, everybody thought that that was the tail and the rest was the dog, but it turned out the reverse was true.”

It wasn't until the advent of the web in the early 1990s that domain name registrations, many of them speculative, started to take off in a big way. Early movers such as Gary Kremen, the original registrant of sex.com, went on to make millions from their investments.

Even Symbolics.com was sold off last August for an undisclosed sum to a domain investor.
The engineers who created the system were not so fortunate. “I was smart enough to invent it, but not smart enough to own it,” joked Mockapetris. “If someone had asked me, do you think you'll get 10,000 names registered, I would have said, well I hope so.”

ICANN, the body now responsible for managing new additions to the DNS, is set to soon open the floodgates for potentially hundreds of new top-level domains, many of which will
compete with .com. So is .com's day over?

Gareth, APA