.com

Industry:	TLD
Founded:	1985
Headquarters:	21355 Ridgetop Circle Dulles, VA 20166
Country:	USA
Website:	www.verisigninc.com
Key People
Mark McLaughlin, President & CEO

.com is one of the first gTLDs of the Internet's Domain Name System that is intended for commercial purposes. It was introduced in 1985 by IANA, which is responsible for the overall coordination and management of the DNS, and led by Jon Postel at the time. The .com gTLD was introduced along with other top level domains, which include .gov (government), .edu (education), .mil (military) and .org (organization).

The .com is the most popular gTLD with more than 100 million registrants worldwide. The global demand for the .com gTLD remains strong as the number of global Internet users continues to grow. Verisign is the registry operator of the .com gTLD, and was approved by ICANN in 2006.

History

The .com gTLd along with the other original TLDs were first administered by the United States Department of Defense under the Defense Advance Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA) when it was first implemented in 1985. The Network Information Center (NIC) which was run by SRI International was the first assigned registrar and administrator of the first domain names. NIC was responsible in registering and hosting the domain names as well as the responsibility of administering the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

On October 1, 1991, the administration of the .com and all the TLDs was transfered to Government Systems, Inc. (GSI) It assumed all the services offered by SRI such as domain name registration, online informations services and help desk operations as well as RFC and Internet-Draft archive and distribution services. The internet registration services was provided by Defense Information System Agency (DISA) NIC operated by Government Systems Inc. This task was sub-contracted by GSI to Network Solutions (NSI).

The legislation of the Scientific and Advanced Technology Act in 1992 gave an expanded mandate to the National Science Foundation (NSF), a statutory body with authority in supporting and an strengthening basic scientific research, engineering, and educational activities in the United States, including the maintenance of computer networks to connect research and educational institutions to assume the responsibility in coordinating and funding the management of the non-military portion of the Internet infrastructure, pursuant to the High-Performance Computing Act which was legislated on December 9, 1991.

In 1993, NSF and NSI entered a five-year cooperative agreement appointing NSI as the sole provider of domain name registrations for .com, .net and .org gTLDs. In 2000, Network Solutions was acquired by Verisign and retained the registry business NSI. Verisign is the curent registry operator of the .com gTLD.

.COM Controversies

Sex.com

Sex.com was one of the most controversial domain name which was registered to Network Solutions in 1994 by Gary Kremen. The ownership of the sex.com was transfered by NSI to Stephen Cohen in 1995 when he submitted forged ownership transfer documents to Network Solutions. Kremen accused Network Solutions of negligent transfer and filed charges against Cohen demanding the return of his ownership to sex.com and return the profits accumulated by the site.

In 2001, US District Judge James Ware ruled in favor of Kremen and directed Cohen to pay $65 million revenue lost and damages to Cohen. Cohen ignore the court order and became fugitive and an arrest warrant was issued for his arrest.Kremen offered a $50,000 reward for Cohen's arrest.

In 2004, Kremen and Verisign which owns Network Solutions agreed to settle their legal battle out of court in an undisclosed amount after the court of appealed ruled that Network Solutions was held liable for the negligence of transferring the sex.com domain to Cohen without verifying if the transfer was made by the true owner.

Races.com

Another controversial domain name was the races.com which was bought for thousands of dollars by MBA student John McLanahan.Network Solutions inadvertently bungled the transfer of races.com and put it on the available list.SportWorld Ltd, a domain name speculator registered the domain name through Register.com, a competing registrar. SportWorld Ltd. turned around advertised races.com for $500,000.

Overcrowding of .Com Domain Space

The .com is the most popular and widely registered top level domain name by internet users worldwide.In 2000, there are more than 20 million registered names under the .com domain name space. The overcrowding of the .com domain space resulted a proposal from the internet community to create new gTLDs to solve the problem. On April 18-19, 2000 during the ICANN Yokohama meeting, the DNSO Names Council proposed the implementation of new TLDs to promote competition of domain name registration business, enhance the utility of the DNS, and increase the available number of domain names. On November 16, 2000, ICANN approved seven new gTLDs which include .biz, .info, .name, .pro, .museum, .aero and .coop to ease up the exhaustion of the .com and the .net domain space.

Top-Level Domain

Request For Comments

National Science Foundation

Deprecated. Domain Name Supporting Organization. Predecessor of the Generic Names Supporting Organization, which advised the Board with respect to policy issues relating to the Domain Name System (ICANN Bylaws).