THE .COM ICEBERG

Let's talk about dot com. I’m going to try and enlighten you with everything I know about dot com.

.com came into existence in January, 1985. It was first administered by the US Department of Defense (DoD).

It is considered a top-level domain (TLD) in the domain name system (DNS).

Taking a little detour,

If you don't know what DNS is, think of it as a telephone directory where all the registered website names are stored in a specific order.

Now what is a TLD ? In www.example.com, this whole link is known as the domain name and part that comes immediately after the last “.” is considered as the Top Level Domain. The first few TLDs who saw the light were .com and .org. These are also considered as generic-TLD.

Moving forward,

At first, the .com domain was given to commercial organizations only, as suggested by the acronym. Later on as time passed, everyone started registering for their own .com domain. Hence the authority was passed from DoD to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and eventually, the Network Solution, Inc. (NSI). They recognized that the registered companies were more inclined to commercial business and non-defense interests. Hence NSF gave full authority to NSI and allowed them to charge all the registered businesses annually.

At first dot com was known for only commercial usage but as soon as its utilization increased, it came to be used for general purposes as well.

This was an exciting phase for new growing businesses as they thought by registering their business on the internet, they could get an upper hand over the big players who were yet to be known on the internet. Hence a majority of them took funding from venture capitalists without a proper, sustainable business model.

Venture capitalists were also excited to invest in this new type of upcoming trade/commerce, hence in my opinion, it was partly their fault to invest blindly without going through the structure of the businesses.

This period came to be known as the DOTCOM BUBBLE where everyone was just second-guessing their ability to get through all the other competitors and outshine them or survive it, because it was new and it hadn’t been tested before.

As I had mentioned earlier when all the big players weren’t aware of the impact of the internet on their businesses, but eventually they overcame this hurdle and registered themselves on the internet. This led to a decline in small, growing businesses. Hence websites like amazon.com, ebay.com, and cisco, though initially suffering huge losses, sustained the crash because of their well-laid-out business plans.

In 2001, all of the above reasons led to the bubble burst and came to be known as the DOTCOM crash and the rest is history. I wouldn’t prefer to go deep on this topic as I'm not knowledgeable enough about this.

Furthermore, talking about why people prefer .com instead of any other TLD:

I think it gives a sense of authenticity whenever a site has .com instead of .net which is another alternative domain. E.g. if you go to an anonymous website with the name www.example.com and then you visit another website www.example.xyz, the latter seems a bit shady according to me, it raises questions about what if it redirects me to somewhere else, or is it a hoax website that might try to steal/harm or take advantage of my digital footprint?

I think we’ve developed this mindset over the years and it's just become a habit of getting used to .com for most of the website. It seems more reliable and the popularity of this domain has definitely grown.

I hope I have conveyed my views on the subject in the easiest possible way and you have enjoyed reading it :)