Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve read ad nauseum about the overly optimistic predictions for the new gTLDs. Some say it’ll the the digital renaissance; others claim it’s the best thing to ever happen to the web, after the browser itself.
This video summarizes well the sentiment:
This is wrong.
Ten years from now we’ll look back and realize how much the new gTLDs have hurt us.
First, most of the new gTLDs add little or no value. I bet we could live another 50 years without a .ninja, a .soy, .fail, .florist, or .loans.
Others will proclaim that the new gTLDs are useful, and point to domains like .nyc, .london, or .website, as examples of the “democratization” promoted by the new categories.
But these will be the exception rather than the rule. In practice the new gTLDS will force brands to spend millions of dollars to protect against cybersquatters rushing to claim new brand-related domains, amongst other threats.
Before you had to register your brand across a handful of TLDs. Now you have 1,400 more to worry about. That’s like a whack-a-mole game, but you’re outnumbered by hundreds of moles for each hand you have.
And yet, this is not my main concern. Brands got screwed and will spend a ton of money, while domain registrars will be laughing all the way to the bank. Whatever, life will be fine.
My concern is a different one: the new gTLDs will accelerate the demise of the URI.
We already lost users to search. It’s more convenient to type “Brand” on the browser and let your search engine do the rest than typing “brand.com”. And on mobile the URL is already hidden from the user, as if it were an irrelevant technical implementation detail. Same on Safari on desktop.
But now multiply this situation by thousands of gTLDs, and you’ll have the perfect Paradox of Choice. Is it a .com, a .net, .cc? Nops. Keep going friend.
Now let’s add to the mix the fact that a) most of the mobile traffic is already coming from native apps, and b) Apple is pushing to bury the URI, and c) Google is replacing everything by its omni-search. And we’re not even talking about Siri or voice-activated search. This will result in a very different world.
My prediction: thanks to the new gTLDs, mobile apps and commercial players will have even more control than today, and URLs will be demoted to second-class citizens. They will still be there, but buried somewhere in the sub-menus of your browser, or the API of your Chrome extensions. Just like IP addresses; you know it’s there somewhere, but nobody cares.
In the name of find-ability and ease of use, we’ll live in an URL-less world. And commercial entities will be rewarded and profit from your traffic.
I’m sure that’s not the web that Sir Tim Berners-Lee envisioned 25 years ago.