A dot-com company, or simply a dot-com (alternatively rendered dot.com, dot com or .com), is a company that does most of its business on the Internet, usually through a website that uses the popular top-level domain ".com" (in turn derived from the word "commercial").While the term can refer to present-day companies, it is also used specifically to refer to companies with this business model that came into being during the late 1990s.