Scary internet future

[cav]

I have this fear that as the years go by and an ever decreasing number of web companies become more and more globally dominant (you know the ones), that these global net corporations force the internet guardians to totally change the way the internet is organised to suit their own corporate ends.

I fear that they could arrange the net so competition is impossible by scrapping extensions. In other words, you just type in "property" and you get the property brand owned by one of the global net corporations. No need for .com. No need for.co.uk.

This would mean all us small guys who own our own little piece of internet real estate would suddenly find our domains and websites are worthless.

Could this come true?

 

[Pred]

i think we have all had the same nightmare.
however theres so much money involved & the web is still finding its feet, things are still pretty new. it works as it is.
tbh, part of that system is already there with search engines.
i mean you can type in pharmacist, the .com may not pop up, but boots may
in some ways it makes it a level playing field if you are a great ideas person or developer or both. or have a lot of cash
bear in mind the youtube & myspace guys only regged them names about 2/3 years ago i think & worked out a garage
imo addresses work best, but the reality is 'who knows' what the future holds.
that's the nature of investment, speculation

 

[tifosi]

The 'big companies' don't own the DNS system, nor the registries that control the extensions... yet (though probably never will).

The move away from domain names will be a radical shift and would need some revolution in how the hardware works. Browsers would need to get much more intuitive in resolving keywords. The big search engine players will have something to do with that. But there's still a client - server issue.

Still the big players are cementing their positions with pretty complex REST based API's opening their backend systems. And that's a band wagon ripe for profiting from in the next few years.

S

 

[Pred]

Still the big players are cementing their positions with pretty complex REST based API's opening their backend systems. And that's a band wagon ripe for profiting from in the next few years.

S

pardon my ignorance. what does that mean?
genuinely interested

 

[tifosi]

REST - Representational State Transfer. Effectively the web2 replacement for SOAP. Developed for transfer of data (normally xml) over the internet.

It's the way Amazon ECS works as well as a lot of the API's for Yahoo / Google (though they like Ajax, which is still xml transfer in the end) / MSLive as well as numerous others. It's the heart of mashup land. Even facebook has got in on the act.

If you want an example there's the Alexa AWIS script I've put a link on here somewhere

 

[julian]

but domains will always be around becuse the beauty of them is that it takes user direct to site withOUT the need for SE's.

once people remebmer a domain they like or need eg: f ac eboo k .com etc they dont need SEs anymore - i dont see how AJAX or RESt is going to pervail / replace this method - But of course SE's will make use of it.

Anyway I think Ajax is overrated it goes tits up, used in the wrong places and is slow most of the time.

 

[tifosi]

once people remebmer a domain they like or need eg: f ac eboo k .com etc they dont need SEs anymore - i dont see how AJAX or RESt is going to pervail / replace this method - But of course SE's will make use of it.

I never said REST would replace anything, and certainly not the DNS system! Just that it's a currently proven method that a lot of the well known sites are using to open their pretty large data repositories to us commoners.

S