According to a survey conducted for VeriSign, 81 per cent of Americans visit five or more dotcom websites a day while two-thirds visit between five and 25 dotcom websites a day. -- PHOTO: AFP
WASHINGTON - RECOGNIZE Symbolics.com? Probably not. But 25 years ago this week the Massachusetts computer maker played a bit role in history - it was the first company to register a .com address on what would eventually become known as the World Wide Web.
Only five companies would join Symbolics.com in 1985 in registering their dotcom names with DARPA, the Pentagon technology research agency which was behind the precursor to the Internet.
Ten years later there were 120,000 dotcoms and "today we have close to 85 million dotcom names registered," said Mark McLaughlin president and chief executive of VeriSign, the company which runs the dotcom infrastructure. "In some ways (dotcom's) become somewhat of a proxy for the Internet," McLaughlin told a gathering of Internet policymakers and leaders here to celebrate the 25th birthday of dotcom.
"Dotcom's becomes part of our lexicon, our way of life, how we communicate, how we interact with each other, how we do business online," McLaughlin said. "It's a platform for business, entertainment, sports, finance, culture and how we connect with people."
Robert Atkinson, president of the Washington-based Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, said none of this was envisioned when Symbolics.com and the others were registered as the first dotcoms. "DARPA let these companies come on what was essentially a government research network," Atkinson said. "When they made that decision they didn't really know what they were doing. What they actually ended up doing was probably creating one of the greatest technological revolutions of all time," he said.
Participants in the 25 Years of .Com Policy Impact Forum also highlighted the economic contributions of dotcoms. According to a new ITIF study, the dotcom domain has become the platform for US$400 billion (S$557 billion) in annual economic activity, a number that is expected to rise to US$950 billion by 2020. Of the world's nearly 85 million dotcoms, 11.9 million are e-commerce and online business websites, 4.3 million are entertainment-related sites and 1.8 million are sports-related sites, according to VeriSign. -- AFP
