An Industry Overview Of The Com Domain Name

By Barry Fenning

Most of the people now prefer to go for internet as the best place to execute their business. Choosing a right form of identity is important for business people to market their product and services among their customers. It is here that they will find a website highly essential. Having a website is crucial and equally important is having a proper domain name for the website.

There are different extensions used for making domain names for websites, used in different contexts. .com domain name is commonly used for commercial enterprises, businesses and other online services. This is one of the top level domain names used all around internet. This was established in January 1985 and continues to be one of the leading domain names used even today. According to latest census, around 77 million websites are registered in .com domain name in internet.

The domain name was earlier contracted to Government Systems Inc and this was started in 1991. National Science Foundation took the responsibility of this domain name in 1993 and then, this was used for non-defence purposes. Later this was charged to Network Solutions and they charged a minimum fee for registration of websites with the domain name. When VeriSign took over Network Solutions, the maintenance of the domain name came under VeriSign and this control exists and continues even today.

After the mid 90s, it is made that any website can use .com as their domain name, though before that, only commercial establishments were officially allowed to use this. The popularity of .com as a domain name went hand in hand with the publicity of the internet and as a result, .com domain name easily caught wide user attention in the World Wide Web.

Most of the leading countries of the world use .com domain name in their enterprises. Yet, some of them practice to use a second level domain name such as their country name to identify the websites. This usually takes another extension followed by .com or .co as .com. xx wherein xx stands for their country.

Apart from the commercial centres, some other organizations also prefer to use .com domain name for their websites. There are several reasons for this. One main reason is the wide spread popularity of this domain name. People easily recognize the website names ending with .com and easily remember it. This has caused many organizations including government sectors and non-profit organizations to think about choosing .com to name their websites. This was considered to be contrary to the laws and restrictions prevailing here in these sectors.

These websites are actually asked to use some other extensions which reveal the purpose and the regulations under which they operate in the internet. The use of .com as their domain name here is mainly oriented at popularity and this is often a violation of laws. When there is hardly any relevance for the registration purposes without restrictions, their choice becomes too much important for their website popularity.

.com continues to be the most popular domain name even today. New registers try to get their domain names registered with .com because of this reason.

About The Author

Barry Fenning is the Marketing Manager of ICANN accredited domain registrar http://www.LCN.com, one of the top UK providers of domain names and web hosting. Please visit http://www.LCN.com to find out more about domain names

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