March 17 2015: Sunday marked 30 years since first .COM domain name was registered, and the Internet and world as we know it changed forever.
Technology company Symbolics registered the first dot-com domain name,symbolics.com, on 15 March 1985. The domain was purchased by XF.com in 2009. By 1987, just 100 dot com domains were registered. The first million came in 1997, a decade later. Amazon.com, registered its domain name in 1994, and Google, registered Google.com as a domain name in 1997.
At the millennium, 2000, there were 10 million addresses. The 100 million mark was reached in 2012. Today there are 116 million.... according to Verisign the lead administrator for the dot com domain name.
In the last 30 years, the Internet has evolved from an unknown phenomenon used primarily by academics and researchers to a global communication, commerce and information sharing channel that few could imagine life without; in fact, nearly three billion people around the world are online today, and more than $300 billion in U.S. e-commerce sales and over $1.3 trillion in global e-commerce sales rely on the Internet.
To address the log jam of internet addresses, ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) will soon introduce more than a thousand new web address endings, known as Top-Level Domains (TLDs).
Check out Verisign's Celebrating #30YearsofCOM infographic.
GoDaddy a leading global domain service provider with an India operation points out that on average, a .com domain is registered every second. About five were registered in the time it took you to read this. The company offers 30% off the cost of new domain names this week to mark dot com's 30th birthday.