New companies increasingly launch with vowel-starved monikers to ensure unique domain names. This is understandable given that the internet is such a big part of modern business, but ask anyone outside the tech sphere about using '.com' in a URL and they mumble something about '.com' for companies and '.org' for non-profits. How can something so poorly understood dictate modern commerce? In fact, URLs aren't even 'machine speak' enough to be useful without domain name decoding, so why contend with machine speak at all?
Geolocation obviates most country-specific TLDs; security certificates ease spoofing concerns; and few people specify sub-domains. Sure, important technologies are built upon URL schemes, and there is no reason for that to change. In fact, if you really want to type a URL into an address bar, knock your socks off, what do I care? People still ping shit. But why should 'normals' contend with machine speak? When did you last type your mum's number into a phone? Do you even know your mum's number?
All major browsers have unified search and address bars; we have the technology. Admittedly the process is immeasurably easier when the company name is unique, which reinforces the trend of dorky start-up naming, but web navigation needn't be more complicated than writing a company name into a search field. Arguably we're already there with Google's 'I'm Feeling Lucky', and I'm sure there are better and brighter things in store than I can imagine, but it frustrates me that we expend vast amounts of money and energy gaming this poorly designed system.
Update (2026): certificates have turned out to be a weaker defence than this suggests. Anyone can get one for free, and the Anti-Phishing Working Group reported that 58 percent of phishing sites used SSL certificates in the first quarter of 2019.