Happy Birthday dotcom, you are older and wiser

Before I eat breakfast, the first thing I do in the morning is log on to the Internet. It wasn't always like this.

But just a few years younger than me, our dear Dotcom has turned 25.

Symbolic.com was the first company to have a dotcom domain in 1985. Two years later, one million domains were registered. Now, people register 668,000 dotcom sites a month.

Domains aren't just popular, they are big business. Some websites like Sex.com have been sold for millions. And it appears that the Internet is giving companies who use the Internet an increased profit by 2.7 percent. As a whole, the Internet is expected to give the economy a boost to $3.8 trillion by 2020.

BBC reports:

"This birthday is really significant because what we are celebrating here is the internet and dotcom is a good, well known placeholder for the rest of the internet," said Mark Mclaughlin, chief executive officer of Verisign the company that is responsible for looking after the dotcom domain.

The whole Internet landscape will change. For instance, searching by text is expected to be secondary to voice.

Cyber criminals certainly know how to use the Internet to their advantage. In fact, the US reported double losses in 2009 for all things cyber crimes. According to the BBC:

Non-delivery accounted for almost 20% of all complaints with ID theft being the subject of 14.1% of the total crimes reported.

"Internet crime is evolving in ways we couldn't have imagined just five years ago," said Donald Brackman, director of the National White Collar Crime Center which helped draw up the report.

At least if you have a problem, you have a place to call to report the digital crimes: ring Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), run by the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com