Dot-com losing dominance at 30?

LONDON — Dot-com is the world’s most-recognised Web suffix, with more than 115 million dot-com domains registered worldwide, representing about 42 per cent of all Web addresses. However, 30 years after its inception, many are questioning whether it can continue to retain its dominance.

Launched by the United States Department of Defence in 1985, dot-com was originally intended as an Internet designation for commercial entities. Technology company Symbolics registered the first dot-com domain name, symbolics.com, on March 15, 1985, and it remains the oldest registered dot-com domain on the Web.

Though dot-com got off to a slow start, the millionth dot-com domain name was registered by 1997 as the Internet 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. The association with commercial entities was also lost when .com, .org and .net were opened for unrestricted registration in the mid-1990s.

Today, dot-com websites are accessed trillions of times each day. Millions of entrepreneurs have built their businesses online with dot-com and the biggest names in business have branded their companies with dot-com addresses.

However, with more than 115 million dot-com domains taken by existing websites or investors, it can be a challenge for businesses and consumers to acquire the dot-com domain name of their choice unless they have very deep pockets.

In response, the Internet industry regulator ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is in the process of reorganising the Internet through the introduction of more than a thousand new Web address endings, known as top-level domains (TLDs). The aim of releasing these TLDs is to not only free up more space on the Internet, but also encourage greater competition and consumer choice. In some cases, high-stakes bidding wars have broken out over specific TLDs. The dot-tech domain, for example, sold for US$6.8 million (S$9.45 million) last year.

Though the adoption of these new domains is still in its infancy, the numbers are rising and are anticipated to increase as awareness of new TLDs continues to spread. THE DAILY TELEGRAPH