.Com 30th anneversary today

Talking about setting up a business, experienced people still suggest registering a .com as one of the basics to start with. Present day start-ups had to tinker a little bit more while naming their business and they often are forced to change their names as ".com is not available".

Sunday marks the 30th anniversary of the first .com registered by anyone. In these three decades, the internet has seen sweeping changes, but little did this computer manufacturer imagined that he was 'booking' himself a slice of history. The first registered .com - Symbolics.com - though had to change hands in August 2009 while the internet saw birth of present day giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter.

The underused domain since then has been a proud possession of XF.com Investments which was originally booked by now-defunct Symbolics Inc. "I had always known that Symbolics.com was the first domain name registered on the Internet. It was a goal of mine to acquire one of the first few names ever registered. I know that others before me had reached out to Symbolics, and inquired about the purchase price of the domain name. For whatever reason, my timing was perfect and I contacted Symbolics right about the time they actually started considering selling the asset," writes Aron Meystedt, owner of XF.com Investments. The website needs to be renewed before March 16 next year.

"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," noted Verisign, a leading seller of domain names. "In fact, nearly three billion people around the world are online today, and more than $300 billion in US e-commerce sales and over $1.3 trillion in global e-commerce sales rely on the internet," it said.

"The first 30 years of .com have led to the creation of over 115 million .com domains, driven the first and second generation of e-commerce and ushered in a digital age. We wouldn't know Google, Twitter or Facebook without it. Unlike most technological advances, .com and domains in general have actually become increasingly more important as the years go by. Today, it's nearly impossible for businesses to function optimally without a significant online presence. And since 2000 (half a lifetime ago for .com), the number of registered websites has gone up by more than 10 time - from just 26 million 15 years ago, to 280 million now," said Rajiv Sodhi, vice president & managing director at GoDaddy India.

While the buzz around .com has been phenomenal over the years, the lack of options and more so because of the demand to try out other domain structures, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an international agency responsible for the naming process, started rolling out new website 'suffixes'. And first in the line, paying about Rs 1 crore each, were at least 21 top Indian businesses houses like RIL, Bharati Airtel, State Bank of India, Tata Industries, HDFC.

The innovations started as soon as ICANN approved a few of the new suffixes, called generic top level domains or gTLD, to the applicants. And bingo! You can now have an address that reads, for instance, Punjabi.Music or Lucknow.Buzz.

The .com was preferred because of its credibility, easy recognition and resale value. But experts say it is imperative that they look at newer options now. "We are already at 240 million-plus domains registered globally. India has around 3-3.5 million domains. The market for websites has been growing and there are challenges around the availability of names in the .com space with many good names already taken," a spokesperson at BigRock had said earlier.

While as many as 1,06,086 .coms are registered daily, the internet has opened ways to include .doctor, .architect which will enable individuals and businesses to create communities in their niche areas.