<nettime> TLDs, URLs and the location bar

[olia lialina <olia@profolia.org>]

Hello nettimers

I'm absolutely indifferent to top level domains and domain names in 
general. Would not give a cent for .art after my name, not even for .lol
At the same time I'm  a big old fan of both URLs and the location bar. 
http://art.teleportacia.org/Location_Yes/ (1999)

I'm fascinated about the way one can narrate in the location bar and 
communicate literary everything through it, including business interests 
and copyright issues. All significant net art projects are incorporating 
address space, some of them take place in this bar solely. And I always 
try to resist any attempt to hide the adress bar in favour of a cleaner 
presentation. And am very sensitive to the intentions of developers to 
get rid of this interface artefact that look oh so unnecessarily 
technical. Because it is the last command line users still have. Our 
only front end to the algorithmic culture :)

So I have mixed feelings when watching the new top level domain rush. 
The nice and optimistic one is that if big players are keen to pay all 
those hundreds of thousands for the words to appear in the location bar, 
it means the location bar will still stay visible in the browsers. And 
that browsers and the WWW are still the future.

At the same time -- I'm getting pessimistic again -- if really big big 
players would care about the content in the address bar, they would 
already find the way to have "facebook", "google" or "amazon" as a top 
level domain. So the interest is not that huge?

What do you think? Will the location bar survive?

best

olia
<http://art.teleportacia.org/>


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