So after all these years we continue to support the middle-man idea (Google) instead of trying to figure out a way to move away from that.
If you want people to move away from middle-man, domains are certainly not the solutions, and the new TLDs will not change that for better nor for worse.
We had domains before Google. People switched because they suck as an human interface.
It's not OK for people to not know how to use the internet.
It's not only about that. I know perfectly well how it works, but I still use Google all the time for finding company websites, because it'd be incredibly stupid to spend 10m guessing the domain instead of making a 300ms request to a search engine.
Domains are great for decoupling URLs, configuration files, etc. from IP changes. They're certainly not a good mechanism for website discovery.
I'm not saying that domain names solve the problem of people typing "facebook" on google [1] or that typing "XYZ company" on google is a problem to be solved by XYZcompany.com. In other words, domains and search engines have distinct use cases and the problem is that people don't know how to use either.
[1] It is a problem because it allows people not to understand the basics of how the internet works. I don't expect people to understand protocols and stuff like that. People don't want to understand technology, they only want to benefit from it. I don't know 80% of the features my TV provides but I don't care - I can still watch TV. People feel the same about the Internet - they know they don't understand it but they don't care because they can still log in to facebook and watch videos on youtube. But using a middle man (call it Google, Yahoo, or even Facebook) to do these things undermines the nature of the internet as we know it and allowing this trend to continue will most likely lead to problems that we will have to resolve. (Not exactly similar, but when MS decided that browsers don't matter it was our job to tell people to stop using IE6 and switch to Firefox. I wouldn't want to be the guy that tells people don't use Google for this, use ____ instead).
This is why Chrome should be viewed with skepticism. It's great for people who know how to use the internet, but what about those who don't? Type something ridiculous in the Address Bar (Google is trying to rename it the "everything bar" or whatever silly name they've come up with). Put a dot where it does do not belong. Mistype or mispell something. Runwordstogetherinalongstring. What happens? You get a Google controlled result. This is not insignificant. (Sorry for the double negative.)
As a knowledgeable programmer, your internet experience with DNS and browsers is very different from others, because you know what you're doing. Many people do not.
Should we teach them? Or should we try to control them by controlling "default behavior"?
Many people reading HN are probably too young to remember the browser wars and the battle over the "default browser" setting. This is why IE triumphed over Mozilla. And as any web developer knows, the web has suffered for it. Users who knew what they were doing could change the default settings. But that did not make the difference. Chrome is highly configurable. But that will not make the difference. Default settings are what matter the most.
The success of ICANN relies on a default setting. It's called "root.hints" or something similar. If a person running a DNS server (that could be anyone, including the end user) changes this setting, they can bypass ICANN and these landgrab gtlds.
In the distant past, "alternate roots", an early reaction ICANN's abuse of power, failed because they were trying to do what ICANN is now doing: make money by selling registrations in additional, redundant gtlds. Perhaps the "alternate roots" of the future will be noncommercial ones that subtract gtld's, not add them. For example, maybe we as smart users will choose to use a "pre-landgrab" root that does not have all these silly redundant gltd's that try to capture whatever unorthodox string a novice user might type in a browser.
Domain names are important, but always remember that those who seek to control the browser can easily subvert DNS. Given this decision from ICANN to sell out (which others, not just Google and Amazon, are following: e.g., the founder of BlackHat is running the newgtld program for ICANN; the author of BIND is partnering with a domainer to run a registry), we're going to see some aggressive moves from commercial authors of browsers to control type-in navigation. Of that you can be sure.
Again, the question is whether we want to teach users how things work, or whether we want to let them remain ignorant so we can control them. In the big picture, ignorance does not help the web. Though it may benefit certain vendors.
Or should we try to control them by controlling "default behavior"?
Who's "we"? I'm not a browser programmer and I have no ability to do that. Frankly, I dislike this common idea that we all part of this common team just because we happen to know something more about computers than the average schmoe. I certainly don't have the power to control any important defaults and therefore people, do you?
And while I can understand the goal, frankly I'm rather skeptical of our ability to teach most people, or of their willingness to be taught, which comes to much about the same. And I'm not sure if they're wrong in not wanting to waste valuable hours of life learning about a bunch of technical stuff that they don't really have much control over.
If a person running a DNS server (that could be anyone, including the end user) changes this setting, they can bypass ICANN and these landgrab gtlds.
But why should we do that? Why do you care? So some companies get shorter domains, so what? We don't even know if those generic TLDs will be accepted. Much ado about nothing, really.
It's not OK for people to not know how to use the internet.