The first commercial Internet domain name, with .com extension
was registered 15 March 1985 in the name of symbolics.com by Symbolics Inc., a computer systems firm in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. By 1992, fewer than 15,000 .com domains had
been registered.
By October 2009, 21 generic top-level domains (TLDs) and 250
two-letter country-code top-level domains existed.
According to Verisign, four million domain names were added to
the Internet in the third quarter of 2014, bringing the total number of
registered domain names to 284 million worldwide across all top-level domains
as of Sept. 30, 2014.
The increase of four million domain names globally equates to a
growth rate of 1.6 percent over the second quarter of 2014. Worldwide
registrations have grown by 18.1 million, or 6.8 percent, year over year.
