The downside is that some countries have restrictions on names; in Australia, a .com.au must match up to a registered business, which is awfully useful to prevent squatting when you add trademarks into the mix. No such dice with the straight .com, .org, etc.

(I like that we have both "restricted" and "unrestricted" zones; I can go register beiberloveskittens.com, for example, but know that beiberloveskittens.com.au won't go polluting the .com.au namespace without at least someone going to the effort of setting up a business for it to be attached to.)

Allowing arbitrary TLD's is semantically equivalent to getting rid of TLD's (e.g. in your last example, "google" could be thought of as a TLD).

I haven't thought about it that way.

But when I try all the possible TLD's as a separate addresses, none works ( http://com , http://org , even http://xxx or http://museum , nothing works).

What is the reason... is it DNS servers that don't like this type of nslookup?

Are you sure its not the browser's own rules and not the lack of an actual website that address?

Try ending with a period.

Certainly http://dk. works. I'm sure there are others.

I don't think it's a technical issue -- I'm pretty sure I've seen a country that hosted something at the tld itself, but I can't find it now.

Good question.

I don't think we do. I think 1 global namespace would be enough.

Say we ditched TLD's and limited domain names to 10 alphanumeric characters. That would still be enough domains to give 450,000 to every person on the planet.

That's with just alphanumeric characters capped at a length of 10. Allow unicode and remove the cap and we would have plenty of domains to go around.

All in 1 namespace.

Edit: yes I understand that the vast majority of those domains would be nonsensical, however even eliminating 99.99999% of them would still leave enough meaningful domains to go around the world many times over.

Domains are, in the first place, needed so we don't have to remember ip addresses.

Yes you coudl just use somthing like a phone number to access websites.

I dont think you have thought this through who would rember that the local doctors surgery is XDFE123456!

that particular string is very memorable ;-)

Every particular string may be made memorable, but you'd have to memorize it. Instead of it being natural, as in: a natural extension of how people think about things.

Back in the day I worked for BT and had memorable mail addresses such as 018222211 (Prestel) and 80:BTG174 (Dialcom/Telecom Gold) at least the Telecom Gold ones where slightly memorable as the prefix BTG stood for British Telecom Gold.

What are these political reasons? I genuinely don't know.

ITU :-)