At 30, the .com Domain May Matter Less — But It Still Tells the Internet's Story Best | QDaily Business History

.com, from the first to the 100 millionth.

Hitting Enter after typing .com is as routine as eating or drinking water, and you have probably never stopped to think that it has been around for 30 years. On March 15, 1985, the world's first .com top-level domain was born: Symbolics, a computer company out of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, registered the first domain with a .com suffix, symbolics.com. It was a small event at the time. Most people were cautious, and few saw how much this symbol — which turned an IP address into something as easy to remember as a phone number — would come to mean for the world.

The site still loads today, though the company is now an empty shell. It once made Lisp machines, which went on to become the first commercial general-purpose computers. Registering a .com was a novelty in 1985, and the novelty lasted almost 30 years. Last year ICANN formally opened up 472 new top-level domains, and people began to feel that the serious thing to do was to find yourself a cooler suffix — the .app Google paid $150 million for not long ago, say, or the .sucks and .porn that make you itch just to hear them.

.com really has become less important, and not only for those reasons. The mobile internet arrived. Now you ask everyone "which app is good to use" rather than "which site is worth visiting," and .com, the suffix that stood for business, turns up less and less in daily life — even though the number of .com registrations grows every year. Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, expressed a similar regret a few years ago. On phones the browser's address bar is usually hidden, while search gets all the emphasis. Still, over these 30 years .com has existed alongside every change in the internet. If you want to know how the internet came to shape the world, .com can tell you that story.

We have tried using the number of registered .com domains as a scale of time, to tell you what happened over these 30 years.

From the 1st to the 100th: .com is born, and the internet finally becomes legible

Time: 1985–1987

People were already thinking in the 1950s about connecting different computers to one another, but it was not until the 1990s that many non-specialists worked out what that actually meant. In between, the key step the internet took toward that second goal was the birth of the .com domain — or, put plainly, the birth of DNS, the Domain Name System, in 1984.

For the people who would eventually use the internet, the point of the domain name system was to give a purely numeric IP address a name that was easy to recognize: numbers became words. The string that followed, whether .com or .gov, was called a top-level domain, and it sorted addresses into categories with a clear sense of what they pointed to. .arpa was reserved for the US military; .net was meant at first only for network providers; .edu, .gov and .mil went specifically to educational institutions, government departments and military bodies; and .org, finally, covered every other kind of organization. .com stood for commerce and was set aside for companies to register, one reason it later became the most widespread top-level domain of all. Handing out domains was at first entirely the job of the US Department of Defense. Registration opened in January 1985, and almost no one outside research institutions and the military signed up. Two months passed before the computer maker Symbolics collected the first .com domain.

For the next two years even Silicon Valley companies stayed cautious about the domain system, and only 100 addresses were registered. The ones we recognize today — HP, Intel, IBM, Apple, Cisco, Adobe — were mostly the leading computer and networking companies of the day, firms that had both worked together and fallen out with one another. What happened alongside those first 100 domains involved the same companies: 1985 was also when the consumer personal computer took off. In 1984 Apple appeared as the disruptor in its Super Bowl ad. The first Macintosh desktop, the machine that commercial promoted, became Apple's best-selling product of the time — though more people remember that Steve Jobs left Apple in that same stretch.

Microsoft released Windows the following year, also controlled through a graphical interface. It was hugely popular and ended up the synonym for the personal-computer operating system for the next 20 years. Yet microsoft.com did not go live until 1993, the year the World Wide Web appeared.

In China, as .com came into being, people gradually began to work out what the internet was — including through that famous email sent from Beijing to Germany: "Across the Great Wall, we can reach every corner of the world." Even now the wish has yet to be fully realized.

Symbolics deserves to be remembered for what it started, but unlike Apple, HP and the rest, its website still carries its original design; it has become a tourist attraction. The company went bankrupt in the 1990s and the domain changed hands, and it was the company that registered it afterward that made a better world out of it.

So what had happened in the world of the internet before that first domain was born? This chart can tell you.

From the 100th to the 10,000th: it brought e-commerce, search engines and the internet boom

Time: 1988–1995

It took five years after the first .com domain for the internet to become a worldwide event. As you have long since heard, in 1993 the MIT professor Tim Berners-Lee used hypertext links to build an easily searchable directory for the internet, and the World Wide Web was born. Only at that stage did the domains already registered formally go live, visible to everyone in the world. Growth in this period was small: the number of .com domains went from 223 in 1990, when the network opened to civilian use, to 9,005 in 1995.

That year Netscape went public, and its stock, valued at $14, rose to $75 on the day — the most conspicuous and most successful case in the whole internet boom. The company made browsers, and it led the market at the time, until Microsoft's Internet Explorer took its place.

Besides investors, .com caught the interest of restless young people eager to try their hand, like David Filo and Jerry Yang, who spent their days in a trailer at Stanford. Yahoo went live in 1994, then still called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." It looks simple now: a directory of categories put on a website, plus a search engine.

That was the classic example of the early internet page you could pull up by hitting Enter; another was America Online (AOL). In the year it went public Netscape also did something foundational: it developed SSL, which made online transactions safer. At the same time, the founders of eBay and Amazon both hit on the idea of selling things over the internet — the first thing eBay sold was a broken laser pointer, for $14.83.

The choice of top-level domains widened too — .uk (Britain), .us (the United States), .de (Germany) — though .cn did not open for registration until 1997. In 1993 the technology consultancy Network Solutions signed a five-year contract with the US government, and a private company began handling registration for the three international top-level domains .com, .org and .net. The next year domains stopped being free. Network Solutions was allowed to charge a registration fee for each domain, and two years later a fixed annual maintenance fee as well.

From the 10,000th to the 1 millionth: it brought an online DVD rental company

Time: 1996–1997

Going from 10,000 to 1 million took a single year. Beyond the jump in the numbers, what happened that year carried on the boom of the previous few. After Jeff Bezos with Amazon and Pierre Omidyar with eBay came Reed Hastings with Netflix, which registered its domain and went live in 1997. It, too, sold things — early on the main business was selling DVDs — and it did not start offering an on-demand subscription video service until 1999, at a time when internet infrastructure still could not support video on demand of the sort Netflix had in mind.

That year the way people connected took another step. Beyond loading a web page, they could now send each other email. On US Independence Day in 1996 the commercial mail service Hotmail.com went live, one of the first webmail services ever built. A year later Microsoft bought Hotmail and folded it into MSN, and localized it for different regional markets. Hotmail caught on fast and soon became the world's largest webmail provider. You can see the first traces of social networking here.

From the 1 millionth to the 10 millionth: it brought the internet bubble, and then, thankfully, Google

Time: 1998–2002

When Sergey Brin and Larry Page, then engineering PhD students at Stanford, founded "Google Search" on September 4, 1998, the internet bubble was already under way. The number of internet companies had begun to grow exponentially, and by the time Google went live 10 million .com domains were in use.

Hot money poured into startups and all sorts of growth-stock prices climbed, which pushed many companies toward riskier and riskier strategies. Normally a company grows in a healthy way by controlling spending while it keeps expanding its market share. Back then, many consumer products and services were happy to give things away free in exchange for fast-growing share. They believed "making money" mattered less than "expanding," and almost everyone assumed that if you got big enough, someone would be there to take it off your hands.

This period, running from 1995 to 2000, is also called the ".com bubble": in stock markets across Europe, America and Asia, the share prices of internet-related companies rose fast. It was a speculative bubble. 2000 was the year it burst. Although 48.1% of that year's venture capital still went to internet companies, most of that money was burned on companies that already had some scale; funding for seed-stage projects came to just 1.4% in all, far below the 2% average of earlier years. At almost the same moment, valuations that had been talked up passed what any investor could bear, and companies that had raised Series A and Series B rounds found no one in the market willing to take the next round. Internet companies began filing for bankruptcy in large numbers.

Between 2001 and 2002, about 1 million .com domains disappeared from the internet. It was the first and only time in .com's 30 years that the count shrank.

Google was one of the companies that survived that period. In China, the same stretch of time produced what is now called BAT: Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu. Google's eventual listing became the most anticipated internet IPO after the bubble burst; after the 2004 offering the company was worth more than $23 billion. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, both only in their early 30s at the time, became billionaires — one of the few consolations people could see after the internet bubble.

From the 10 millionth to the 100 millionth: it brought social networks and a new way of communicating

Time: 2003–2015

There are 116 million registered .com domains today, but what people talk about more is "hey, how about I go get myself a Libyan domain?" As mentioned above, Google spent $150 million on the .app domain, most likely to promote mobile apps. A wave of pornographic domains went on sale as well; Microsoft bought Office.porn and Office.adult. Around the 10 millionth .com, Mark Zuckerberg was in his Harvard dorm room working out with his roommates what would later be called the social network. At first people's sense of what a social network could do probably went no further than News Corp buying MySpace. But when thefacebook.com went live in 2004, typing .com and hitting Enter began to open up more forms of sharing and interaction, and that got people excited. In the years that followed came twitter.com and youtube.com. This is the stage people know best today, the one that got them thinking about the world in terms of "six degrees of separation."

The other possibility .com opened up, alongside Facebook, was Skype, which changed how people talked to one another over the internet — the first free internet phone. "The day I downloaded Skype, I knew the era of traditional telecoms was over," said Michael Powell, chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission. It has to be admitted: when .com set out from its 100 millionth domain, more than one era had ended.

Graphics: Lin Yuyao