[Infowarrior] - Dot-Com turns 25

[Richard Forno]

Dotcom marks silver anniversary
By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/8567414.stm
The internet celebrates a landmark event on the 15 March - the 25th  
birthday of the day the first dotcom name was registered.

In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts entered  
the history books with an internet address ending in dotcom.

That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon.

It took until 1997, well into the internet boom, before the one  
millionth dotcom was registered.

"This birthday is really significant because what we are celebrating  
here is the internet and dotcom is a good, well known placeholder for  
the rest of the internet," said Mark Mclaughlin, chief executive  
officer of Verisign the company that is responsible for looking after  
the dotcom domain.

"Who would have guessed 25 years ago where the internet would be  
today. This really was a groundbreaking event," he said.

Commercialisation

For most of the late 1980s and early 1990s hardly anyone knew what a  
dotcom was. Scholars generally agree that a turning point was the  
introduction of the Mosaic web browser by Netscape that brought  
mainstream consumers on to the web.

A season of reports exploring the extraordinary power of the internet,  
including:

• Digital giants - top thinkers in the business on the future of the web
•
With 668,000 dotcom sites registered every month, they have become  
part of the fabric of our lives.      	     	

Today people go to dotcom sites to shop, connect with friends, book  
holidays, be entertained, learn new things and exchange ideas.

"Dotcoms have touched us in a way we could not have imagined," Robert  
Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation  
(ITIF) told BBC News.

"It used to be, 10 years ago you could live an okay life if you  
weren't engaged on a dot com site on a daily basis. You could get what  
you needed.

"But today we see how dotcoms have enriched our lives that if you are  
not engaged you would be fine but much further behind than the rest of  
us."

Proof of that Mr Atkinson said can be seen with how dotcoms have  
commercialised the internet "bringing consumers choice and value and  
businesses greater customer reach and profits".


DOTCOM GROWTH
• 21m domain names registered between 1985 and 2000
• 57m domain names registered between 2000 and 2010
• Source: OECD
A study by the ITIF claims that "the average profitability of  
companies using the internet increased by 2.7%".

The research also found that the economic benefits equal $1.5  
trillion, which it says is "more than the global sales of medicine,  
investment in renewable energy and government investment in research  
and development combined".

By 2020 the internet should add $3.8 trillion (£2.5trillion) to the  
global economy, exceeding the gross domestic product of Germany, it  
found.

The future

An estimated 1.7 billion people - one quarter of the world's  
population - now use the internet.

Verisign's Mr McLaughlin only sees that figure growing over the next  
quarter of a century.

"I think that the way we access information today, mostly still  
through PCs and laptops is highly likely to change; that the voice  
will be more important than text input.

"I think the whole fabric of how we access, search, find and get  
information is going to be radically different."

At the moment Verisign logs 53 billion requests for websites - not  
just dotcoms - every day, about the same number handled for all of 1995.

"We expect that to grow in 2020 to somewhere between three and four  
quadrillion," Mr McLaughlin told BBC News.

One quadrillion is 1,000 billion.

It is a phenomenal pace of growth that would have been very difficult  
to predict 25 years ago when a small computer firm took the first  
pioneering steps into the connected world.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/8567414.stm

Published: 2010/03/15 08:49:15 GMT

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