When did domain names come out?

all you need to know about domain names

(and some you don't need to know, but is interesting anyway)

CHAPTER 1.01
DOMAIN NAMES - WHAT'S THEIR HISTORY?

Every presence on the Internet is identified by a series of numbers (142.56.89.43, for example). This is called the Internet Protocol, or IP, address. To make these IP addresses easier to remember, the early proponents of the Internet decided to allocate a 'name' (or series of characters) to each IP number. Because no two sets of IP numbers are the same, no two domain names can be the same. As the Internet was developed in the USA, the Americans were first to set up an authority to allocate names to the IP numbers. Subsequently other countries set up their own authority.

DOMAIN NAMES IN PRACTICE
The first domain name to be registered was symbolics.com, assigned on March 15th 1985.

Domain names are, and always have been, allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. The majority of generic, one word domain names were registered in the early to mid 1990s. Many of these were registered by IT students who were amongst the first to use the Internet on a regular basis. It is the generic .com domains that many consider to be the best. It is also difficult to trademark a generic word, which means that generic domain names are the most valuable in the open market.It is worth noting at this point that although a domain name is intangible, the person or entity that registers the name is legally the owner of that name. This situation is complex in that the owner of the name does not have total control over its use. Rather than calling them the owner, ICANN (see next section) uses the legal-sounding term 'rightful name holder'. To complicate the issue still further, the person who registers the name is not necessarily the owner. And herein lays a warning. Few businesses will register their domain name with the relevant naming authority, they will do so through a registrar - see section 1.06, how to register a domain name. When I registered the names that I own, I did so through a company that I trust. I trusted them to put me down as the owner, which they did, because I know how to check. Sadly I have come across a number of organizations that did not use such reliable registrars. Or, as is more often the case, they trusted their website developers to register the owner of the domain name as their client, not themselves.

The scenario is that A Trusting Business Ltd hires Dodgy Web Design Inc to develop a website, register a domain name and arrange the hosting of name and site. What Dodgy Web Design Inc does is register the domain name - atrustingbusiness.com - but lists themselves as the owners of the domain. To make matters worse, Dodgy Web Design pay for the hosting service in their name also. A few months down the road, A Trusting Business Ltd wants to make some changes to their website or becomes dissatisfied with Dodgy Web Design - and it is only then they discover that they have no access to their website or domain name. Although they might feel like sending a team of 'heavies' round to see their website developers, protracted legal action is probably the only recourse for A Trusting Business. And by this time A Trusting Business has had all of their stationery printed with the domain name (which they don't own) directing customers to their website (which they can't change). And it is also painted on the sides of their trucks and vans? Not the sort of situation you want to find yourself in.

DOMAIN NAMES IN PRACTICE : from the history booksIn the early days of the world wide web - and I'm only talking about the mid-1990s - surfers had to type in the http:// at the beginning of any URL. Contemporary users are now relieved of this chore as browsers now add the http:// as a default when www is entered before the domain name. Whilst in 'those were the days' mode, early versions of the Internet Explorer browser defaulted to the .com of any given word. So back around 1998 simply typing 'atrustingbusiness' (no www, no http://, no .com) into the browser window and hitting the 'enter' button took you tohttp://www.atrustingbusiness.com.Although this state of affairs didn't last too long, it served to cement the value of .com over other suffix options.

Contemporary browsers commonly need only the primary domain and suffix to be entered in order to deliver a web page (eg atrustingbusiness.com), though entering only the primary name (eg atrustingbusiness - no www, no http://) returns whichever website is sitting at the top of the browser's associated search engine results for that term.

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Copyright copyright 2009 Alan Charlesworth. All rights reserved.International Standard Book Number: 978-1-4452-0538-0No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author.NoticeEvery effort has been made to make this book as complete and as accurate as possible, but no warranty or fitness is implied. The information provided is on an 'as is' basis. No responsibility is assumed by the author for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein.

Image Credits: Rrraum / Shutterstock

Verisign recently  reported that the number of registered dot-com domain names exceeded 128 million for the first time. With a wholesale price of $7.85 each, this means $1,004,800,000 in annual fees, and that’s before factoring in reseller prices, country code domains and alternative extensions to measure the domain-name industry as a whole.

The internet has come a long way since the first domain name, Symbolics.com, was registered in 1985. Even longer when you consider it was only 1994 when Joshua Quittner (a WIRED writer at the time) contacted McDonald’s to see if they were interested in registering mcdonalds.com, and, well, got nowhere.

The state of the domain-name industry has vastly changed. Almost everyone with a business online has tried to register a dot-com domain name — only to find their first and best choice was gone. Most great domains were grabbed years ago by investors like Kevin Ham (CNN dubbed him, “The man who owns the Internet”). Even Lana Del Ray’s father is an iconic domain-name investor, and members of a Middle Eastern royal family own one of the largest portfolios in the world.

It wasn’t just people buying domain names over these two decades, either. Companies like Hearst, AOL, CBS, Salesforce and Amazon have collectively paid tens of millions of dollars for domain names; with many of them still not in use.

More recently, GoDaddy spent more than $100 million acquiring portfolios of premium domain names from private owners.

An industry that is finally maturing

What was once an industry comprised mainly of individual investors and service providers is now attracting corporate money like never before.

Industry giants have hundreds of millions for auctions and infrastructure. Big brands like Amazon, Google, Verisign and WordPress are investing heavily to own and operate entire domain-name extensions. Even company-branded extensions are now going live. Barclay’s is already using home.barclays, and new domain-name extensions for both BMW (.bmw) and Travelers (.trv) have been delegated.

One may even say it’s a natural evolution of media, where brands finally want to own the channel versus renting a space.

Will this evolution in naming work?

On the surface, it may sound crazy. After all, how many people will buy a .blog or .app domain name? How many domain names do people or companies really need? These sound like fair questions, right?

The thing is, domain names are not a zero-sum industry. Very few people believe or can make any solid case that dot-com will lose its majority status (myself included). However, success is not always defined by millions of registrations. and very profitable models exist when you own a registry.

Think about it. A low-cost, high-profit product, with cheap infrastructure, recurring revenue models, possibilities for scale, global reach and more. In a world where technology leads venture capital investment, and a 10 percent ROI will win you Wall Street rewards, owning a domain-name extension may not be one of the craziest investments around.

How big Is the market, really?

No one knows for sure. But it’s big.

Millions of new domains have already been registered, for a variety of different reasons. Some companies use them as complementary domains to an existing brand (Slack is using slack.help for support); others use them as a primary URL; some see a marketing purpose, others have defensive reasons.

Many sales are also at premium prices. DomainNameWire reported that Hanes spent $30,000 to acquire T-Shirts.store (yes, with the hyphen), Visual Dynamics purchased 3D.software for six figures and Autism.rocks fetched $100,000.

Owning a domain-name extension may not be one of the craziest investments around.

At an individual level, it becomes even more plausible that many of these new extensions can grow. There are thousands of people called Joe, yet there is only one joe.com — if you don’t have a pocketbook the size of Manhattan, then you probably will never have a chance to own joe.com. However, you can choose from joe.live, joe.social, joe.link and more. The concept of using these new domain-name extensions for personal use has never been more apparent, especially when relevant extensions provide an opportunity to brand ourselves in a way .com never did.

It’s not even just about use. Some of these domain-name extensions have become more like commodities, traded between investors, rather than having a traditional use. According to a CNBC interview, Sedo estimates that 54 percent of these new domain names are owned by Chinese registrants — a market that already owns many of the world’s best two- and three-letter dot-com domains.

Not everybody needs another website, but the numbers speak, and they say lots of people can use another domain name.

The big league

It’s not uncommon to spend well over $100,000 for a premium domain name. However, buying an extension is a whole other league — a league in which brands have only been too happy to play.

For example, the rights to .BLOG were purchased by WordPress for $19 million, Google paid $25 million for .APP, Amazon paid up to $10 million for .BOOK and Verisign backed a $135 million winning bid for .WEB — and most of these companies have acquired the rights to more than one new extension.

Now, combine these investments with the reach of these brands. They have billions of users collectively, and driving adoption to an already loyal consumer base is a lot easier than starting from scratch.

The future is already here

For Q1 2016, Verisign reported some staggering statistics, including the total number of domain names across all top-level domains has grown to 326.4 million, and the collective number of new GTLD registrations (which first launched less than three years ago) now exceeds 16 million domains, accounting for 4.9 percent of all domain names registered.

Think about that. In less than 25 months, these products, which many people doubted, now collectively account for nearly 5 percent of a product that has primarily been on the market for more than 20 years.

Five percent market share. That is huge.

And, ironically, McDonald’s now owns the .mcdonalds and .mcd extensions.

Twenty-two years later, it’s likely fair to say everybody is lovin’ the internet a little more than they did in 1994.