Ah, URL, we hardly knew ye. As has been widely reported and almost uniformly lamented, the ICANN has decided to “relax” naming rules for website addresses, ditching the nearly universal .com, .org and .net for things like .dot, .awesomenewending, and .fart.

Shouldn’t we celebrate this? Shouldn’t we feel emancipated from the shackles of URL arcana, free to define a website address that really describes who we are, instead of some third-level compromise?

Well, yes. And no. As constricting as the old system was, it gave a familiar structure to website addresses, so much in fact that it had nearly reached social awareness saturation. URLs were expected to end in .com, so much in fact that if you simply type in “nike” into any modern browser it will take you to www.nike.com.

The new rules obliterate this familiarity, and add a second level of complexity to an already ridiculously technical way of reaching a site. Instead of just having to remember djdougpound, for example, since the .com is inferred, you’ll now have to remember dougpound.dj, or somesuch nonsense.

All of this is really moot, which brings me to the title of this post. The URL was already on its way to obsolescence. The rise of all-powerful Search has made remembering any web address a non-issue, and as the technologies become more intelligent, no one is going to care if your website is named awesome.com or awesome.brah. They’re just going to find it in Google anyway.

That said, I’m still going to go out and register ICANN.hascheeseburger.