Happy Birthday Dotcom and here’s to your commercial success in next 25 years

March 22nd, 2010 | Insights

ITIF is marking the 25th anniversary of the very first .com with a comprehensive report, "The Internet Economy 25 Years After .Com: Transforming Life and Commerce." (pdf available for download) You can celebrate the 25th anniversary of dotcom on the very aptly named website – www.25yearsof.com

Some of the things that you will find in this report

Of the roughly 250 million websites about 80 million are .coms. Even after the collapse of the .dom bubble, the number of domain names grows by an average of 668,000 a month.

The .coms alone account for some $400 million in economic benefits to businesses and consumers and that figure will likely double in the next ten years.

Despite high-profile failures in the dot-com bubble burst, typical survival rates for these new businesses were actually higher than normal and spectacular success stories have followed.

Only about 25 percent of the world’s 6.7 billion participate in the dot-com economy but is changing – 73 million Chinese became Internet users in 2007 alone.

In order to sustain the progress that has been made in empowering consumers, spurring innovations and boosting productivity, the report urges:

Adoption of policies that allow for the deployment of technologies, like wired and wireless broadband, mobile payments platforms, health IT, and other Internet platforms.

Removal of regulatory and legal barriers to the emergence of new e-business models.

Creation of incentives for companies to invest in Internet-enabled business practices.

Advancing digital literacy.