TLD Timeline
A chronological history of top-level domains. From the first seven TLDs in 1985 to the new gTLD era and beyond.
The Dawn of DNS
The Domain Name System was born out of the need to replace the unwieldy HOSTS.TXT file that mapped hostnames to IP addresses on the ARPANET. …
DNS replaced a centralized text file with a distributed, scalable naming infrastructure, making global internet …
The Early Web Era
Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web in 1989 transformed the internet from an academic research network into a global information platform. Throughout the …
The web democratized the internet, turning domain names into valuable commercial assets for the first …
Post-Bubble Consolidation
After the dot-com crash of 2000–2001, the domain industry restructured around ICANN's emerging governance framework. New sponsored TLDs like .biz and .info launched to relieve …
ICANN consolidated its authority over DNS policy, establishing the accredited registrar model still in use …
The New gTLD Revolution
ICANN's New gTLD Program, announced in 2008 and launched in 2012, was the most dramatic expansion of the domain namespace in history. Over 1,900 applications …
The new gTLD program shattered the monopoly of the original TLDs and created a genuinely …
The Modern Domain Landscape
Google's launch of .app in 2018 and .dev in 2019 demonstrated that tech giants could operate successful TLDs, while GDPR's 2018 implementation dramatically changed WHOIS …
Privacy regulation reshaped the registration data ecosystem, while DNS security became a mainstream concern. The …
The Next Frontier
ICANN's next round of new gTLD applications opened in 2024, promising another wave of hundreds of new extensions. The AI boom sparked unprecedented demand for …
AI's cultural dominance has made .ai one of the most sought-after ccTLDs ever, illustrating how …