Now that we don’t have to wait for a dial-up modem to kickstart our Internet connections, and most sites open without having to type in http://www, there is still one final frontier to overcome: the “.com.” Dot-com is a popular web address extension in the U.S., while other countries often favor domains with location-based significance: Germany has .de, the U.K. uses .co.uk, and .ca stands in for Canada.
Regardless, most people are familiar with the extension, even if they don’t realize that the “com” stands for commercial. It’s so preeminent that countless blogs offer advice on what to do if your preferred .com isn’t available, and when people talk about the Internet boom and collapse of the late 1990s, they talk about the dot-com bubble.
