> That puts "com" first as you read it, despite the fact that it conveys no useful information. They are little more than flavor-text that is annoyingly required for uniqueness purposes.

Except that's not true at all.

The reason they became "flavor-text" was because they appeared to be tacked on to the end for no reason other than uniqueness. Previously existing organizational schema worked for decades with proper categorization: Usenet is a wonderful example of just how powerful it is.

Had URLs been defined correctly, "com" would have immediately told the user "a commercial entity", "org" would have immediately meant "an organization", "net" probably wouldn't exist, and these newer TLDs like "google", "audio", "apps" would have made a hell of a lot more sense.

> Usenet is a wonderful example of just how powerful it is.

Usenet suffered from some a similar problem to domain names: everything started creeping into the "alt" top-level because it was the popular top-level free-for-all.

And the usefulness of the classification for humans was debatable since every topic could be found in multiple locations and some, like rec.arts.tv and alt.tv, rapidly ended up dwarfing entire top level categories like humanities.

But nowadays TLD-s have little relation to the content category of the domain, look at the .com distortion for example. It's a valid claim that TLD-s are not really useful information. If you look at the current domain structure it's more like a file extension analogy.

The whole point is that this is only the case because of the TLD's position at the end of the root address, which has caused it to be perceived as a tacked-on additive for uniqueness' sake. If it had been placed at the beginning all along this likely would not be the case nowadays. TLDs very well could have been useful information; that's the point @awalton was making.

I agree to an extent, it would be interesting to see how the distribution of domains across TLD-s would look if it were reverse from the beginning, but I'm skeptical about a big shift. Country codes would still dominate local content and my feeling is .com / .net would be more balanced.

Sure, but "www" much less significant.

In an ideal world, 'www' would be superfluous. Your browser would know what server to contact for the WWW service by requesting SRV records for the bare domain.