.com domain names

What .com is

.com is short for commercial. It was created for commercial entities and businesses, but that expectation was abandoned in the mid-1990s and .com has been an unrestricted, general-purpose namespace ever since. Its IANA type is a generic top-level domain (gTLD); ICANN's registry agreement listing records it as Non-Sponsored, and it is not a country-code TLD, however American its origins. Its IANA registration date is 1 January 1985, placing it among the original top-level domains alongside .edu, .gov, .mil, .net, .org and .arpa, and the first .com ever registered was symbolics.com, taken on 15 March 1985 by the computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc.

The registry operator as of 2026 is VeriSign, Inc., through VeriSign Global Registry Services in Reston, Virginia, listed by IANA as the sponsoring organisation with the record last updated 10 March 2026.

There has been no change of registry operator, and the lineage is routinely garbled. .com was administered under US Department of Defense auspices from 1985, then by the National Science Foundation from 1993 with Network Solutions Inc. as contractor, then under US Department of Commerce oversight from 1997. VeriSign acquired Network Solutions in 2000 and in 2003 divested the registrar business, which kept the Network Solutions name, while retaining the registry. Verisign has run it continuously since, and does not act as a registrar for .com — every registration flows through an ICANN-accredited registrar.

Who can register .com

Anyone. There is no nexus requirement, no business-registration or trademark requirement, no documentation, and no post-registration verification by the registry. Individuals, nonprofits, governments, hobby projects and parked portfolios all register .com freely. Nothing is enforced because there is nothing to enforce.

The one check every registrant meets comes from the registrar: under the ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement, registrars must verify the registrant contact's email address or telephone number. That is a cross-gTLD obligation rather than a .com eligibility rule, but ignoring the verification message can get an otherwise valid domain suspended.

What .com costs to own

ICANN's base gTLD registry agreements contain no price caps at all. .com's caps come from a separate United States government instrument, the NTIA Cooperative Agreement — which is why .com is capped while .net, .org, .info and .biz are not, and why ICANN is not the body regulating .com pricing.

The formula is specific. Amendment 35 to the Cooperative Agreement, dated 26 October 2018, permits Verisign to raise the maximum wholesale price by up to 7% a year, but only in each of the final four pricing years of every six-year period, the first beginning 26 October 2018. The permitted rise is 7% above either the preceding year's maximum price or the highest price actually charged that year, whichever is lower. Two frozen years, four years in which prices may rise, then repeat — and before that amendment, .com pricing was frozen outright from 2012 to 2018.

The price was frozen through 2025 and most of 2026, and on 23 April 2026 Verisign announced a 7% increase effective 1 November 2026. Any increase requires six months' notice to registrars, and registrants may renew for up to ten years at the pre-increase price beforehand. That lock-in window is the most actionable pricing fact here.

.com has no registry premium tier — every unregistered .com costs a registrar the same wholesale amount, so a five-figure price on a desirable name is an aftermarket ask from its current owner, not a registry charge. First-year and renewal fees are identical at the registry level; any gap between a cheap first year and a costly renewal is a registrar promotion above a common floor.

Recovery after expiry is the one genuinely expensive event in a .com's life. An expired name passes through an auto-renew grace period of around thirty days, then a thirty-day Redemption Grace Period — the window after deletion during which only the original registrant can restore the name — at a registry fee materially above a renewal, before it drops.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

Minimum registration is one year, maximum ten, and a .com's expiry may never sit more than ten years in the future. Renewals stack up to that ceiling — the mechanism used to lock in pre-increase pricing.

Transfers use the standard EPP authInfo code, commonly called an auth code. It must be unique to the individual domain, and the losing registrar must supply it and lift the clientTransferProhibited status within five days of a valid request. A successful transfer adds one year to the term. Three sixty-day locks apply, and they cause most transfer frustration:

• Sixty days after initial registration, measured from the creation date in the registry record. This bites constantly on drop-catch and aftermarket purchases.
• Sixty days after a prior inter-registrar transfer, except transfers back to the original registrar where both registrars agree.
• Sixty days after a Change of Registrant, which the registrant may opt out of — but only before the change is made, not afterwards.

Verisign imposes nothing on top of ICANN policy; when a transfer stalls, the cause is almost always registrar-side. A reform is pending but not in force: the GNSO Council approved the Transfer Policy Review Working Group's recommendations on 12 March 2025, and the resulting policy would replace the sixty-day locks with 720-hour (thirty-day) locks and a time-limited Transfer Authorization Code. No effective date is confirmed, so plan around the sixty-day locks.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

Since 28 January 2025 the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) has been the definitive source for gTLD registration data, replacing sunsetted port-43 WHOIS as the contractual system of record.

.com is a thin registry: it holds only the sponsoring registrar, nameservers, status and dates, while registrant contact data sits with the registrar. A registry-level RDAP query returns a referral to the registrar's own service, so due diligence on a .com always takes two lookups.

Registrant data is redacted by default in public output under the ICANN Registration Data Policy, in force since 21 August 2025, with contact through an anonymised email address or a registrar web form; most registrars redact legal persons as well as natural persons. Non-public data can be requested through ICANN's Registration Data Request Service or from the registrar directly.

Privacy and proxy services are permitted. Verisign imposes no registry-level restriction, and every major registrar offers .com privacy, often bundled at no charge. ICANN's Privacy and Proxy Services Accreditation Program was never brought into force, so privacy remains a registrar service rather than an accredited one.

DNSSEC is fully supported — Verisign signed the .com zone in March 2011 — and internationalized domain names are supported at the second level across scripts including Cyrillic, Greek, Han, Hebrew, Arabic, Korean and Japanese, registered as A-labels under IDNA.

Who .com suits, and who should avoid it

.com suits essentially every commercial business in the world, for behavioural rather than technical reasons. It remains the default assumption in users' heads, in browser autocompletion, and in recall from radio, print and conversation. It is the extension people append when they half-remember a name, so if your brand will be spoken aloud or typed from memory, .com is the safest container for it. It also suits anyone building brand equity or contemplating an exit, since .com has the deepest and most liquid resale market of any extension.

It can reasonably be skipped by organisations whose identity is genuinely and permanently national, where a well-established country-code extension outperforms it at home — .de in Germany, .co.uk in Britain, .nl, .fr and .com.au all carry more local trust domestically. Registered nonprofits are often better served by .org, though most still take the .com defensively.

The buyer who should walk away is the one accepting a badly compromised name purely to get a .com: hyphens, deliberate misspellings, filler words, six-word strings. A clean, short name on a credible alternative beats a mangled .com on every practical measure.

Common mistakes with .com

• Confusing taken with for sale, and aftermarket price with registry price. Around 166 million .com names are already registered, so most short or dictionary words are owned. A buyer sees a five-figure broker page and concludes .com is expensive or that Verisign charges premium rates. It does not; that number is a private seller's asking price.
• Buying a compromised .com instead of a clean alternative. Adding a hyphen, or the, my, get or hq, or a deliberate misspelling to force a match produces a name that fails the phone test, leaks traffic permanently to the real .com, and often walks into the incumbent's trademark.
• Letting a registration lapse and meeting the redemption cliff. An expired card plus a spam-filtered renewal notice can cost a company a name it has used for a decade: restoration during the Redemption Grace Period carries a substantial fee, and after pending delete the name is gone.
• Assuming a .com purchase carries trademark rights. It does not. Registering a name matching an existing mark in bad faith can lose you the domain under the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy, whatever you paid.

Two contracts, one registry: why Washington sets the price of .com

Almost every analysis of .com pricing goes wrong in the same place: it treats ICANN as the body that caps the price. Two separate instruments govern .com, and conflating them makes the pricing story incoherent.

The first is the ICANN .com Registry Agreement, executed on 1 December 2024 with VeriSign, Inc. as registry operator and described in trade coverage as a six-year extension. Like every base gTLD registry agreement, it contains no price caps. Were it the only instrument in play, Verisign could price .com as it liked.

The second is the NTIA Cooperative Agreement, NCR-92-18742, a United States government instrument entirely distinct from the ICANN contract and the actual source of .com's price constraints. NTIA renewed it automatically on 30 November 2024, having concluded that continuation is in the public interest; it had sought price reductions from Verisign, the parties could not agree, and the existing constraints carried over unchanged. NTIA confirmed the agreement retains the vertical-integration ban keeping Verisign out of the .com registrar business, and stated it is not intended to confer federal antitrust immunity.

The renewal was contested publicly. The American Economic Liberties Project published a policy brief calling for Verisign's position in .com to be reined in, and members of Congress pressed for scrutiny, including a letter from Senator Elizabeth Warren to NTIA and the Department of Justice. NTIA renewed regardless, and what followed was advocacy and correspondence rather than a formal antitrust action. The stake is simple: remove the Cooperative Agreement and .com's price cap disappears entirely.

A similar inertia shows in .com's registration data. ICANN's Thick WHOIS Transition Policy for .COM, .NET and .JOBS, adopted in 2017, would have moved Verisign's registries from thin to thick data, but implementation slipped over unresolved Registry-Registrar Agreement amendments and GDPR concerns and was never completed. Nearly a decade on, .com and .net remain thin while .org, .info and .biz are thick — so your registrar is the sole custodian of your .com's contact record.