Jack Shedd, of Big Contrarian weblog, "a designer and a developer in the process of moving to Chicago, IL" remarks on ICANNs latest decision to permit *ANY* top-level domains (TLDs), as long as their respective holders will foot the bill for maintaining them:

» [...] The internet used to be flat. It was the great equalizer. "www.apple.com" and "www.jackshedd.com" are, for all intents and purposes, equal; Equal until you hit return. With this new proposal, Apple will obviously seek to get "store.apple" running. Because frankly, that's just a better URL than www.apple.com/store. But little-oh-non-billions having me is gonna be stuck with www.jackshedd.com, and mark my words, the day will come when .com is looked down at just as .ru is now.

".com? Are those guys legit?"

The barrier to reputation will get higher. [...] «
http://www.bigcontrarian.com/2008/06/26/dibs-on-dotdot/

Imagagine if in a few years (probably decades) time this became cheap enough for the avarage user :-) You could just have your name as your website address eg. http://martin.rix

.ru isn't that bad a TLD, I mean there's quite a few good domains! who.ru (already taken) imready.ru (avalible) wherethehell.ru (avalible) :P

Instead of adding more top level domain names, which will cause problems with phishing and also makes it more and more costly to buy a given "name space" for a product or site, why not get rid of the current top level domain completely. OK, so the transition phase would probably make this impossibly hard, but then people would use...

"google" to access Google
"de.google" is a subdomain on the "google" domain for German users
or "german.google.com" if they prefer
"apple" is Apple
"blogoscoped" for this site and so on

By default, whoever owns the ".com" right now will be given the actual domain.

Right now, in common usage on the web "org" does not mean it's a non-profit organization as it should, "net" does not means it's about networks, "com" does not mean it's commercial and so on... and things like "google.to" are a heaven for spammers and make it costly to reserve all domains.

Philipp Lenssen: Wouldn't there be a massive number of fights for who gets the domain if the .org, .com, .net, etc. have different owners?

Many web browsers will add ".com" if nothing is found at the typed-in address. So, for example, I can type just "blogoscoped" in the address bar and I get taken to blogoscoped.com.

The best way forward would be to formalize this, as Philipp suggested.

It ain't gonna happen of course, because there's no money in it for the greedy folks at ICANN. They are taking back all the goodwill that has been built up around .com domain names, and selling it all over again at over a thousand times the price.

Mysterius, yeah like I said I think the transition phase would probably make this impossibly hard...

Roger Browne: alas that's the default url-expansion behavior only in Netscape/ Mozilla-family browsers, while others, esp. the Exploder, are just as likely to treat it as captive search term, and send it to its default's search.microshaft.com engine, or whatever.

Philipp is onto something, actually close to the idea of Tim Berners-Lee's, who publicly regretted that he didn't go with once-iconoclastic UK-reverse-order urls such as
scheme/domain.sitename[/dept/library/filename[.suffix]]
which would have allowed assembly of URIs in uniformly unidirectional, granule-descending order (as has always been the case with IP-addresses). A sample mail-adress would --had, for all I know-- read tbluk.leedsu.cs.zx80 ;-))

Ah, well. Nobody then reflected over such minor things as that the entire "http: //" invocation, if treated as default scheme by httpd-clients, could be done away with, too. Not to mention the entire "http: //www." preamble which was unpronounceable, and, the dub-dub-dub-part of it, really a remnant of a short-lived pedestrian method to differentiate between ftp-, gopher-, and pure-W3 addresses. In all fairness, I did question Tim once about the very length of pronounciation of "double-u double-u double-u" in English (which, were it named acc. to later W3-rules, it'd have to be "w21w" ;-)), not to mention all-consonant strangeness in other languages. He replied that it was easy to type, and, besides, it was too late to do something about it. That was in 1992, when the number of public www-servers was still in the hundreds globally, there were mere thousands of documents, and just two legal repositories of all w3-httpd software, @info.cern.ch, and SLAC (slac.berkeley.edu?). So just a few changes in www-libs there would have borne any desired results at relatively small cost.... well, it's certainly too late now.

Ianf: well that's another big advantage to Mozilla-family browsers then!

Regarding the "www" prefix: I don't think it was ever mandated by any W3C or IETF document. I can't imagine why any website requires a www prefix. Why make your users type www.something.com when they can just type something.com? As with blogoscoped.com, the "www" prefix can still be optionally accepted (with redirection) to avoid losing those people who like extra typing.

Roger, you're quite right it wasn't mandated, but, as I wrote (based on what I remember from these times, on the Internet since 24aug1989), it grew out from *informal* attempt to distinguish different type of services when they all, including early www, were accessed uniformly from telnet in this fashion (ie. that was when the TTY www-linemode, written by Nicola Pelli, was the only browser for the service):

~/> telnet info.cern.ch
~/> telnet info.cern.ch 8080
~/> telnet gopher.umich.edu
~/> telnet ftp.sunet.se

...so that logging in to private account on such an "undifferentiated" machine required the -l[ong] option:

~/> telnet -l ianf info.cern.ch
password:

Well yeah, historically the "www" prefix arose because you typically had a separate machine dedicated for use as a webserver, and "www" became the default hostname for webservers.

But you can get the same effect in many other ways (e.g. by forwarding port 80 traffic to the webserver).

I'm not sure this separate/ dedicated-physical server of yours, as the cause for presence of redundant www-prefix, is a correct assumption. Mainly, I think, it was convenient for the adms to differentiate while grokking /var/logs/httpd/* between traffic to various virtual services housed on the same hardware. Not even the original NeXT of Tim's was a dedicated server, even though it once handled 100% of all web traffic! ;-)) Of course it was possible to achieve differentiating by tacking colon-delimiter-decimal-port-number onto any path. But would that have been any easier? Do please remember that the other, now largely unheralded because it just *seems* so self-evident, ETERNAL INVENTION of the W3-team was the single-unbroken-line url. A method and one or more arguments baked into one.

It wasn't the first such attempt known to me[*], but the first where it was the default mode of control.

[*] 1991?1992 I published at least longer two docs at an Australian server, whose admin installed an experimental, or merely hacked?, version of the finger daemon. It allowed for compound doc-path delivery in this fashion:

~/> finger doc=name%userservername