.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).[1]
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.[2] Verisign is the registry operator of the .com gTLD, and was approved by ICANN in 2006.[3]
History[edit | edit source]
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.[4]NIC was responsible in registering and hosting the domain names [5] as well as the responsibility of administering the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.[6] On October 1, 1991, the administration of the .com and all the TLDs was transfered to Government Systems, Inc.[7]