Google doesn't need to have their own agenda to do this, they are simply standardizing the usage pattern the majority of users are accustomed to. People don't know what URIs are, they type "facebook" in the large search box at the center of the browser window, then click/tap the first search result. Many even type "google", click the first search result, type "facebook", click the first result.

However, before search boxes in the location bar facilitated such behavior, users were perfectly able to navigate to sites by the use of URLs. (And these were much less experienced users then.) It's not that long ago that human readable URLs (especially the composition of the path) has been a "hot" topic. – There's a possible discussion about de-facilitating users by convenience.

They were also predominantly more computer-savvy users back then. And it would probably be very difficult to convince users that it's somehow better to type "facebook.com" instead of "facebook". The extra letters appear completely redundant. Indeed, from a technical perspective, I fail to see why the "big names" shouldn't just be hoisted to top-level domains.

Then, typical internet users were secretary level office workers, mostly just trained on the job how to use MS Office. Still, it worked, for the most part.

(There was a learning process. In the early days, there was reoccurring theme with clients and new websites, which were also their first intense exposure to the web, where first as much as possible pages had to open in a new window -- "I don't want my page to go away" -- followed by the moment, the client learned the back button and asked, why it wasn't working with those links.)

Regarding big names hoisted to TLDs: They are free to buy one, if they care. (For those big names, it's a small investment.) Otherwise, who is to decide, who is big enough and who just fails the test? Is this discriminatory, may it even hurt a viable interest? Is this still net-neutral? And, ultimately, I'm not sure, if single-word host names weren't rather apt to add to the confusion. (Autocompletion works just fine for this, anyway.)

If I recall correctly ICANN didn't allow custom naked gTLDs to resolve to web pages. Just read about when people were upset that they wouldn't be able to call their local box http://dev/ because the top domain is now owned by google.

Rather than an omnibar returning search results, would be interesting if it returned from somewhere like your bookmarks & if you typed in something not in bookmarks, it could show you results & for the first link you click have a dialog "Do you want 'Facebook' to always link to this site?"

You could show all the nitty gritty details of the URL and more tech-savvy users could learn over time, but non-tech users would have a simple alias that always takes them to a trusted site.

Something like a cross between AOL terms and trust-on-first-use system.

> I fail to see why the "big names" shouldn't just be hoisted to top-level domains.

They will: http://apple