The end-game is that everyone is going to have their own suffix for their website. And the first part of the hostname will standardize into, I don't know, maybe "com" for the commercial part of your entity, "org" for the more community-oriented part, "net" for projects that have to do with interconnectivity, etc. Maybe even regional ones like "us" and "co.uk".
Maybe even some sort of routing system, just spitballing here.
/my-shop/com.shopify
/elections/gov.whitehouse
Surprised nobody has thought of something like this.
The only problem I see with this system is that the ICANN could get greedy and possibly sell this conventional "com", "net", "org", etc prefix system to the highest bidders and centralize them to just a few suffixes for us to choose between, then we'd be forced to register our websites as prefixes of a small oligarchy that owns the handful of suffixes. :/
I think the end game will be that the domain part of a URL will become optional so that it is valid to enter just a TLD in the browser and the company that owns that TLD can redirect.
Essentially TLDs will become the new domains and only companies will be able to afford to buy one, but they will do it for the prestige (like the equivalent of owning your .com today).
More likely, the whole system will just collapse and so we will use a private organisation who provides a service linking approximate names to websites, something like a telephone directory but it doesn't require you to correctly spell things and get the right prefix. It will occasionally be a problem where you search for "Honest Company" and it takes you to honest.co.fraud, but if it does that too often I guess we will switch to a competitor. I guess the main solution to that problem is to have a list of different possible matches, and require the user to pick the right one.
Whereas I don't disagree here, it does break how DNS is supposed to work.
A client machine can 'belong' to a DNS namespace, e.g. mycorp.com. Once it does, the DNS resolver should append the namespace automatically onto any non qualified DNS query. So looking up 'server01' would automatically try to resolve 'server01.mycorp.com'.
Therefore in a browser, entering 'https://google' in the address bar should result in a DNS resolution attempt of 'google.mycorp.com'.
However, [almost] all browsers, now override that, and prepend 'www.' and append '.com' to any unqualified address BEFORE it hits DNS. If you drop the 'https://' the browser assumes it's a search query and just sends it off to the default search engine.
It's another example of browser providers riding roughshod over established standards under the guise of 'ease of use'.
For example,
Maybe even some sort of routing system, just spitballing here. Surprised nobody has thought of something like this.The only problem I see with this system is that the ICANN could get greedy and possibly sell this conventional "com", "net", "org", etc prefix system to the highest bidders and centralize them to just a few suffixes for us to choose between, then we'd be forced to register our websites as prefixes of a small oligarchy that owns the handful of suffixes. :/