[At-Large] Opera now lets you ditch boring web links and use emojis instead

Evan Leibovitch evan at telly.org
Mon Feb 21 06:32:46 UTC 2022


On Sun, Feb 20, 2022 at 11:36 PM Karl Auerbach via At-Large <
at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org> wrote:

[...] the domain name system is slowly fading from the public eye; that we
> are moving into a world in which DNS names are becoming more a part of
> the hidden machinery of the net (like MAC addresses) and that higher level
> naming abstractions, things like Twitter names or Facebook handles, are
> becoming the more prevalent forms of naming on the net.
>

You're right of course, but there's a whole industry of self-proclaimed
branding experts holding inventories of "memorable" domain names that prays
you're not. It's a very burstable bubble.

But it's not just social media handles and emojis that threaten. In parts
of Asia and elsewhere, the PITA of non-Latin strings have been widely
bypassed in favour of QR codes pointing to "illegible" domains. That's
where the real Universal Acceptance lies.

> I also am of the belief that on the net attributes are often more important
> than names.  For instance, if I am looking to buy some machine screws I
> care more about the attribute "hardware store" than any particular name
> of such a store.


Arguably search engines meet much of this need already. One could and
should have realized that "memorable" domain names were on the way down
once browser makers merged the search and URL entry fields. From then on,
typing <mumble> would almost always yield a more satisfying result than
specifying <mumble.com> or for that matter <mumble.anything>. The
commoditization of common words and especially category names, driven by an
ever-growing mining of TLDs under ICANN, has just sped the process of
turning people towards search and away from normal domain names.

Cheers,

Evan
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