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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