Rube Goldberg Reinvents the Domain Name
http://blog.snipperoo.com/2007/11/death-of-the-do.html
Summary: A guy who could have bought billions of dollars worth of domain real estate by applying his foresight (but didn’t) now declares “domain names dead” and hypothesizes that we will abandon domain names in favor of Rube Goldberg inspired Universal Search Locators (USLs) which will take over as the foundational elements of the web..
While I could actually see some variant of this trying to marginalize domains in the next 50 years, in the end I think the obstacles are so many and the challenges so daunting that nothing could actually “do away” with the usefulness of domain names. Consider:
—You would need to have Google agree on a global standard with Microsoft, Yahoo, Sina, Baidu and all other competing search services so that the experience of USL’s is uniform. You wouldn’t want to type Snipperoo at Baidu and get to Widgettown instead.
—Even if you got everybody to agree on a standard you wouldn’t have mail because email runs on domain names. This chap would surely argue that we could all abandon our email in favor of search engine messengers.. but those would have to run on a globally universal standard too.
— After clearing the initial hurdles above, you’d just have to convince every existing site owner to adopt your new platform and abandon their trillions on global collective branding in domains (think of every business card, bus bench, billboard, TV commercial, directory you’d have to change)
— You’d have to persuade governments of the world to cast away their national heritage embodied in (CCtlds)
— You’d have to convince Verisign to roll over and play dead.. or just buy them.. ditto with PIR (.org) and Affilias..
— Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, and Safari would have to give up their browsers because we wouldn’t need them.
It’s funny to read posts like this because search engines actually search for domain names.. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Without a name there is nothing to search for 
In fact it would be easier to just buy all the available domain names from large name holders around the world.. a few billion would roll up 60% of the most visited sites on the net.
Quote: “”The idea here is that as your content is broken up and thown out into the four corners of the web, that is where you come to reside. You no longer have a central address, you only exist where you end up. If you are good, you end up in some very powerful places. If you are bad - well, we all know what happens on the web if you are bad.”"
Those “Places” will need to have a unique location of course.. There is no such thing as a “place” without a unique location.. and on the Internet you need a Domain name to have a unique location – unless you want to start typing-in IP numbers that is.
This guy needs to lay of the over the counter cold medication. Sahar calls bullshit too.. Next.
IP numbers are not permanently allocated. Switch registrars or web hosting and you will likely end up with different IP numbers. The domain name may be an alias but it is the one constant in the equation.
These ideas may have some merit in terms of search and for online content publishers. But, I can hardly imagine how this would work in the ecommerce world. Would I have to “search” for my online bank accounts everytime I need to pay a bill? While search is something that most net users do, once they find what they want they want to bookmark it to return. How would you bookmark amazon.com if a specific website didn’t exist? Is assumption that consumers would be agnostic as to where they purchase things as long as they get what they want at a fair price? Anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes understanding market research knows that is not always true. If “amazon” became a saved search on my desktop but every time I click on it some sort of search is run to provide me with the relevant and expected content, then that seems like a far less efficient process than simply being able to go where I want to directly. Imagine your local grocery store always moving to different locations in your neighborhood!
That was an interesting read, but it’s a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. What did you make of the “in the mid nineties I semi-singlehandedly invented the domain name industry” line? Seemed a bit arrogant, IMHO.
RSS didn’t obviate the need for domain names. RSS is just data. Since widgets involve code, which can be malicious, there are trust issues. People are going to expect trusted domains won’t host malicious widgets.
If domains no longer existed, where would that layer of trust exist? With search engines, as perhaps the author would suggest? No, we’re already seeing the disintegration of trust regarding search engines. At the browser level? Nope. One could argue that domains become even more important due to the proliferation of widgets.
***FS*** Great comment Richard.. and great point about the widgets.. I actually never thought about it that way.
When we start to debate these things we abandon reality to come into the realm of philosophy:
“It’s a symbiotic relationship. Without a name there is nothing to search for”
Maybe the author is paid to make theories, and that’s all very well and worked from the time of the Greeks and much earlier. But after reading the article I cannot help but feeling that even the author is not perfectly sure of what he is saying.
Developing theories is important for the progress of humanity (and if they pay you for it even better) but at least the theory should look at reality if not from every possible angle, at least from the most important ones, like some of the ones you mention in your questions.
Regards
Javier Marti
Trendirama.com
It was also interesting to see who else invented “the internets”. I’ve got in my list Al Gore, the author of that article, Javier Marti, Hommer Simpson…
I think the only way we can look at this is from the angle that this guy is deliberately writing this to create controversy.
Controversy = link bait. I mean everyone is posting about it.
If he is not doing this for link bait… then he must be institutionalized immediately.
are .asia names worth anything?
***FS*** I don’t like the space.. an English extension for a foreign language continent.. buy.cn if you want asian domains
Asia is not only China…
Tibu,
You need to land users in the correct Linguistic and Cultural Web Space. You can do this with ASCII domains but it is tough. The Chinese often do it with numbers, but they attribute all sorts of meanings and nuisances to numbers.
Generally, speaking there are two reliable ways of achieving this, but each works well in some context and not so well in others.
The most established way of doing this is by using ccTLDs and this works excellently where the target language is represented in Latin characters. Some cultures, however, miss the accents especially where they are not really, accents but part of an entirely separate letter, as in Czech.
When you get away from languages that are normally written in characters, in order to make the domains intuitive, it will be necessary to represent names in character sets other than Latin. Would you intuitively type Chinese, even if you had the right equipment? So would you expect those that read and write in other scripts to intuitively input domain names in English?
The real argument boils down as to where Non Latin characters are needed, and then whether the ccTLD gives further advantages over dot com or not. I believe that if you watch current behaviour, there are many signs that should indicate which is true. The same answer may not be universally applicable, however. In some instances languages and countries almost map to one another, and in other situations they bear almost no relationship.
At the end of the day, it is about defining target markets and working out the most reliable way to direct users to the content they seek, or at least something that acts as a reasonable substitute.
Ask yourself careful, where the hell is Englishname.Asia going to take me?