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Re:.confusion: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs by gruseom on Friday June 27, 2008 @09:24AM (#229718)
I find the controversy around this a little odd. URLs are practically arbitrary strings. All they're doing is generalizing the last bit.
Re:.confusion: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs by jcl on Friday June 27, 2008 @09:57AM (#229739)
There is some benefit to having non-arbitrary strings for URLs.

For one thing, if you see the text "interslice.com" on a business card or in an advertisement, you have some reassurance that it is a website. If you just have the text "interslice", the reader needs additional prompting to know it is a website.

Likewise, if you see someone's e-mail address listed as "[email protected]", you can tell just by looking at it that there's probably something wrong with it -- maybe you can even diagnose and fix the problem yourself. But you can't do this for arbitrary strings, which carry no such redundancy.

Re:.confusion: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs by j2d2 on Friday June 27, 2008 @10:42AM (#229772)
I agree. Let's get off this Luddite train.