CNN.com published an article on the 30 year anniversary of .com and at the end asked if .com would even be a thing in 50 years ? New gtlds and ecommerce over smart phones were mentioned as possible reasons to answer no.
From the article:
What will the future hold?
Today, the undisputed champ is challenged by plenty of eager newcomers. New, more personalized domains are cropping up all the time: .coach, .green and .money are just a few of the latest. Increasingly, e-commerce is being conducted on smartphone apps, making it reasonable to ask whether .com will even be a thing in 10, 20, 50 years.
Will future Fortune 500 execs bellow orders to dismantle the old .com websites as a relic of “quaint” 20th century technology? Maybe, but probably not, says Schulte.
“I think .com will always be present at least in a residual way,” she said. “History is important, even in places as seemingly ephemeral as the Internet.”
Read the full article on CNN.com
The kids who are 5 years old today, they will come of age in the gTLD era. That generation may be more open to non .com options. Assuming you even need domain names in 20+ more years.
They said the same thing about Elvis and he is going strong as well. I for one cannot stand using mu phone to see the internet Its ridiculous, .com is the king always will be the king simply because you can’t change the game 30 years in.
I made a similar point last month over on the Dotology.com/blog:
“Consider if .com didn’t have virtual monopoly on commercial Internet realty for the last thirty years. What would the landscape look like today if .com had been just one of nearly 1,000 gTLD offerings. Imagine a world where .com is the least relevant TLD – it’s relatively meaningless and without context. Thirty years later would .com still have 116k registrations? Would .co or .company or .xyz or one of the yet to be launch gTLDs stand atop the heap? Of course that’s not the world we live in.”
https://dotology.com/blog/new-gtlds-are-more-successful-than-com/
It’s just so hard to imagine for most people because .com, .net, .org and ccTLDs around the world have had such a huge headstart/presence for so long.
.com will definitely not exist in 50 years. The better question is will .com exist in 20 years (or even 10)? As we near the Singularity and with exponential growth of information technology, how will we even be connecting with our information? Futurists like Ray Kurzweil and others predict by the 2030s we will be hybrids of machines and biology, with computers with the size of a red blood cell being able to flow through our bodies. Our thinking will be a combination of biological and non-biological at a certain point.
Will .Com Even Be A Thing in 50 Years ?
The .COM Brand will continue to garner the lions share of Online Web Start-ups. The Online community continues to vote with their money by purchasing .COM extensions for their entry into e-commerce start-ups.
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
It’s a bit like asking if power lines, water mains, electric light switches, water faucets and electric fans will still be around, just to name a few of the myriad examples that have been around for so long already. Also, the more fundamental question is not about any TLD, but “will DNS still exist?” I read a good article recently kind of along the lines of how the Internet itself can be thought of as already being or becoming one of the things we tend to take for granted that is so ubiquitous and so entrenched in life that we don’t even notice it anymore – until it’s gone of course. So the question posed by this article about “.com” per se is just another fanciful notion that doesn’t even ask the proper question. Unless there is a technological transformation and upheaval so radical and so previously unthought of that it completely displaces DNS technology and renders it obsolete, then I seriously doubt there is any remote possibility of “.com” or any other popular TLD becoming extinct or irrelevant, or even no longer being extremely popular.
You must also ask yourself if all people ever want to do or will want to do in the future is stare hunched over at something as small as a phone or even a tablet.
As I have been writing this post here, I have had a large box fan blowing on me the whole time, including right now. It is nothing but a simple box fan. How long has the fan been around, how many decades, perhaps even as long as a century already? I remember once speaking about fan technology with a network manager who extolled it as a technology that has stood the test of time. Open your PC now – you should find a fan or two in there even.
Get the picture?
Dot com isn’t going anywhere . . . but it wont be what it used to. And YES, dot com domain name values will decrease lower. Investors are buying up dot coms right now to keep the illusion that everything is okay. But eventually they’ll stop buying them.
10 years ago it was discussed on domain forums if there would ever be a time when domains would be replaced or not needed. Here we are in 2015 with domains selling better than ever in the aftermarket, and more domain extension choices than ever before. I think domains will be around for a long time, just like phone numbers, street addresses, business and city names are still needed. Domains are the addresses and phone numbers for locations on the internet, which isn’t going anywhere.
Kellie
.Com has 116 million + domains registered not 116k
@Michael – holy crap. I cannot believe I made that error. Thanks for catching that.