With the .com domain hitting its silver anniversary today, a prominent Washington think tank is marking the occasion with a report looking back on 25 years of transformation. Indeed, a quarter century later, it seems fair to say that the rise of the commercial Web ranks on a short list of profound historic developments. And it’s just getting started!
Datamation reports on the findings of the study about .com’s 25th birthday, and has the details on the group’s recommendations for how to keep the Internet train a-rolling.
Twenty-five years ago today, Symbolics.com was registered as the world’s first .com domain. The growth since then has been staggering. The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington think tank, on Monday issued a report on the .com’s impact, arguing that the birth of the commercial Web was a breakthrough with few rivals throughout history.
The report also has some important context for the relative newcomers who might think the Internet revolution started with Facebook, Twitter and other Web 2.0 services. By ITIF’s reckoning, the first 25 years will be a hard act to follow if you consider this summation of progress:
The Internet economy has “unleashed entirely new business models, spurred the creation of new products and services, changed how consumers shop, transformed how corporations sell their products and procure their inputs, boosted economic growth and fundamentally [changed] how individuals interact, build communities and socialize.”
Of roughly 250 million Web sites about 80 million are .coms. Even after the collapse of the dot-com bubble, the number of domain names has grown by an average of 668,000 a month.
