Does anyone care about domain names anymore?

Various news outlets are breathlessly reporting that ICANN (the organization responsible for managing internet domain names) will effectively allow any top level domain (TLD) (for example “.com” and “.org” are TLDs).

Am I alone in wondering why anyone gives a rat’s? In fact, in thinking that this is a usability disaster waiting to happen?

First up, does anyone actually type a domain name into a browser more than once at most? (auto complete in any browser since about Viola means that once you’ve been to a domain more than zero times, typing the first two or three letters of a domain name is all you need to do).

In fact isn’t that what the search field in most browsers is for?

If anything, this actually devalues .com domain names - many browsers currently assume “.com” for any word you type into the address field (others assume you want to search for that term on the web). So if you already own “.com”, the value of this auto complete function just vanished - afterall, if a user types “pepsi” - do they mean “pepsi.com”, or “something.pepsi”?

But it gets worse - right now the standard structure of domains is something like this

“http://domainname.com/contact”

But if we move to arbitrary TLDs, we’ll start seeing “http://contact.pepsi”, http://contactus.coke” and so on - there goes a lot of the value of autocomplete of URLs in browser address fields. Well, pretty much all of it. And of course, out of habit, or because older browsers (which take a while to go away you know) will still auto-complete the “.com” bit, folks will keep going to “.pepsi.com” - for example “contact.pepsi.com” instead of “contact.pepsi” (which looks just wrong dammit) giving a confusing 404 message, and creating an order of magnitude more complexity for server redirects.

Then, where the hell is the home page? URLs like “http://pepsi.com” by convention direct the user to the home for a site. Now, we’ll need something more - “http://home.pepsi”? But will everyone follow that convention? What about foreign languages?

Who exactly drove this decision? In whose interests is it? Because, I don’t really see it as being in anyone’s interest (other than say ICANN, who will make a killing on domains like .xxx). But one thing’s for sure - breaking well understood patterns for users around URLs is not a user centred decision.

File this under bone headed anti user decisions on the web.

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