25 Years of the .com gTLD

An anonymous reader writes "The domain COM was installed as one of the first set of top-level domains when the Domain Name System was first implemented for use on the Internet in January 1985. The internet celebrates a landmark event on the 15th of March — the 25th anniversary of the day the first .com name was registered. Of the 250 million websites, there are over 80 million active .com sites. In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts entered the history books with an internet address ending in .com (however, on 27 August 2009, it was sold to XF.com Investments). That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon. Here is a list of the 100 oldest still-existing registered .com domains."

Comments

Fanboyism

[Yvanhoe]

Apple is there.
Microsoft is not.

Alcoa is 40th oldest?!

[jschen]

I find it surprising that Alcoa is so high up the list, beating out big computer and communications tech names such as AMD, 3COM, Apple, and Cisco. I'm curious as to what compelled them to register a domain name way back in Nov 1986.

Re:They should have kept the price high

[MrCawfee]

Godaddy had the 9.95 price point when their competition was ~25/yr, and it wasn't immediate. .CO is the .new .CM. I work at a registrar and almost all of our .CM registrations tend to be screened out using fake credit cards. Even after it goes live and the price point for .CO is probally going to be ~60/yr, that is still too expensive for the "legitimate" squatter to put up their advertising pages. Judging from the .CM registrations at my company that got through the screening process, they tend to be deleted within a few months when the credit card dispute comes through. The registry doesn't care because they have already gotten their registration fee. I'd say that atleast 50% of our .CM registrations are screened out as fraud automatically, and the remainder are a mix between companies trying for brand protection and fraud. .CO will never be a big legitimate tld, my feeling is that you are going to see:
    a) .CO domains parked or forwarded by legitimate users for brand protection
    b) .CO domains parked by the registrar due to a chargeback so they can get atleast some of the money they lost back.
    c) .CO domains parked by the client until the company that owns the name goes through the dispute process.

Bad thing for the internet, good thing for Columbia, good for .

Stock performance

[bobdotorg]

I'm curious how the publicly traded stocks of the early adopters fared from time of registration until the peak of the dotcom bubble in March 2000. I suspect abnormally high returns relative to Nasdaq or the S&P500.