Registering a .com cost nothing at all until 1995
For its first decade, the internet's .com suffix was free, run under contract for the US Department of Defense. Only in 1995 did registrants start paying, at $50 a year. By 2020 more than 145 million .com names existed, and the suffix had lent its name to an entire speculative bubble.
When the Domain Name System went live in January 1985, com was one of seven original top-level domains, alongside edu, gov, mil, net, org and int. The letters stand for commercial, reflecting its intended use by businesses, but since the mid-1990s anyone has been able to register one. American companies usually prefer it to the national .us suffix, and many countries run their own commercial equivalents, such as co.uk, com.au and co.jp.
Administration passed through several hands. The Defense Department first contracted the work to SRI International, which ran the Network Information Center. From October 1991 Government Systems Inc. held the operations contract and passed it to Network Solutions. With most use no longer military, the National Science Foundation took charge on January 1, 1993, and in 1995 it let Network Solutions start charging: $35 of each $50 annual fee went to the company, $15 to a government fund, and new names required two years up front. The Commerce Department assumed authority in 1997.
Verisign, which bought Network Solutions, now runs the registry under US law, selling names through registrars accredited by ICANN; in March 2009 there were 926 of them. It had about 100 million com names on its books by December 2011, a figure that reached 145.4 million by March 2020.
Popularisation turned the suffix into slang. Firms that boomed between 1997 and 2001 often worked com into their names, earning the label dot-coms, and the frenzy of speculation became known as the dot-com bubble. An alternative, the biz domain introduced in 2001 for companies that missed out on a suitable com name, never caught on widely.
Source: .com
