Dot-com gets a birthday bash, Bill Clinton to speak at anniversary party

On March 15, 1985, the dot-com economy was born. Symbolics.com was the first domain to be registered.

During the rest of that year, only five other names were registered. Ten years later, there were 120,000 names registered. Today, there are 85 million registered .com sites.

"Over the last 25 years, the use of the .com domain names has expanded rapidly from a specialized name space for the high-tech community to an integral part of the global economy," writes Rob Atkinson in a report released this morning taking a look back at the history of the now-legendary "dot-com."

Today is, in fact, the 25th anniversary of the .com domain. You can expect to hear a lot of dot-com chest-pumping this week, with the 25th anniversary celebration planned for tomorrow in Washington. Former President Bill Clinton will give the keynote address, since it was under his administration that the Web and "dot-com" really got its start and began to flourish.

Atkinson, founder of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, estimates that the annual global economic benefits of the commercial internet equals $1.5 trillion--more than the global sales of medicine, investment in renewable energy, and government investment in R&D, combined.  

If e-commerce continues to grow even just half as fast as it grew over the last five years, by 2020 the global e-commercewill add $3.8 trillion annually to the global economy--more than the GDP of Germany.

And businesses involved in enabling the dot-com economy contribute directly to economies, accounting for 2 percent of employment in the United States, for example, with wages equaling 2 percent of U.S. GDP.

A few other fun factoids from the 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 business were actually higher than normal and spectacular success stories have followed.

--While the U.S. lags behind in IT areas like broadband and health IT, it leads in e-commerce.   But even so, , less than a third of Americans buy things online and only about half the small businesses in the U.S. have a website.

--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.