It was 25 years ago today when the first dot-com was registered — Cambridge, Masssa.-based Symbolics computers. Over the years, dot-coms became symbolic of both the Internet bubble and bust; now they’re simply part of our everyday lives. More than 650,000 dot-com domains are registered every month; current estimates put the total number at over 71 million.
I remember signing up for my first domain in 1994, a whole nine years after the first dot-com domain was registered. It was quite an antiquated process — it took a whole lot of faxing to get it done. (I’m sure many of today’s young entrepreneurs have no idea what I’m talking about.) Even back then I had a tough time picking up my most wanted domain: Om.com.
Related on GigaOM Pro: Did we really learn anything from the dot-com crash.
Those were the days – when you had to convince somebody at network solutions that you were the owner of a name before they would register it for you (at least it was free) and you had to get a NIC handle before they would talk to you (mine was JP302)
Yeah, and even then they would give you so much hell. That alone is a reason I keep thanking the Internet gods for guys like Go Daddy. đŸ™‚
The takeaway lesson from all this, of course, is simple:
Gatekeepers for fundamental technologies are EVIL. Even if they have the best of intentions (no, I’m not thinking of NetSol), eventually they’re going to be put in a position where they have to choose between protecting their own interests and advancing the wider interests of the users of the technology in question. Any political organization, including businesses, will seek to protect their own interests first — for reasons that are hard to argue with.
“it took a whole lot of faxing to get it done.”
LOL..Really!