Why is it that .com is such a widely used suffix to websites, what does it stand for and why does it matter what the suffixes are when the DNS server converts the websites to their respective IP addresses anyways?
In: Technology
First of all, a clarification on some other answer: .com was *not* intended for commercial websites. .com was not intended for *any* websites. .com was created 6 years before the web even existed.
So if it was never meant to be used with the web, what was it designed for? The DNS system (mapping names to addresses) was designed for computers. In the early days of the Internet, each connected computer had a unique address. People started giving names to their computers because they were easier to remember than addresses.
At first, the names didn’t have .com at the end. In fact they didn’t have a . in them at all. In the early days of the Internet, computers had only a single word as their name, like “georgeoffice” or “jenny” or something like that.
The problem is: if you called your computer “jenny” and someone else also called their computer “jenny”, how would you distinguish between them?
Well, maybe you work at AT&T Labs and the other person works at MIT. So yours is now called “jenny.att” and the other one is “jenny.mit”. The . in between those names created a hierarchy that could more specifically identify one computer on the Internet.
But now there’s another problem. Maybe someone at the Manukau Institute of Technology (also called MIT) has named their computer “jenny”. How do you distinguish *that* MIT’s jenny from the other MIT’s “jenny”? Okay so you add one more level to your hierarchy: jenny.mit.usa vs jenny.mit.nz
And so and and so on.
This process has to stop at some point. The point at which it stops is called the “top level”. The things at the very rightmost end of a computer’s name is called its “top level domain”. com, edu, org. nz, fr, etc., are all top level domains.
The original com/edu/org/net/gov/mil/int taxonomy (commercial organizations, education organizations, non-profit organizations, networking organizations, governmental organizations, military organizations, international organizations) is a holdover from long before the web ever existed, from when the Internet was a US project. In the old days, these were the only 7 possible top level domains.
As the Internet became more internationalized, other countries adopted their own country codes. The US technically has one (.us), but it’s rarely used because so many organizations had already established a domain in the com/edu/org/net/gov/mil/int system. Since established companies were using .com, newer companies started using .com, too, to look legit.
There’s no requirement that com/etc. organizations should be in the US. These days the designation of .com is almost completely meaningless.
But it’s still a necessary organizational tool to make sure computers with a name don’t conflict with other computers with the same name somewhere else.
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