Twenty-five years of .com celebrated today

There are currently more than 80 million registered .com sites

Dot com registry VeriSign led the celebrations today marking the 25th anniversary of the first ever .com address to be registered.

The anniversary coincides with research by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) that found that the internet economy drives more than $1.5 trillion (£990bn) in global annual economic activity.

Most of this revenue is derived from the 11.9 million e-commerce and online business web sites recorded by VeriSign’s Internet Profiling Service.

A further 1.8 million sports-related sites and 4.3 million entertainment-related sites are also registered with a .com web address. The most popular words among .com URL’s include "home" (1.2 million), "online" (1 million) and "land" (891,000), the firm said.

Mark McLaughlin, chief executive and president of VeriSign, said the 25th anniversary of .com was an important milestone and a good chance to remember how the internet has changed the world.

"For anyone under the age of 30, they probably don’t remember when the internet wasn’t in their life. It’s become such an essential part of how we work, live and play," he said.

As part of the development of the .com infrastructure, the company outlined its roadmap for 2020, promising to be able to offer capacity 1,000 times greater than it currently provides in order to handle four quadrillion queries per day.

The first .com address to be registered was symbolics.com, and today there are more than 80 million .com web sites registered.