The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has just decided that the web is going to get a whole host of new domain names — which could be as varied as .bank, .sport, .shopping or pretty much anything else you can dream up.

The article I’ve linked to cites fears of cybersquatting (sitting on a domain name that you shouldn’t really have, like if I bought and amazon.biz and tried to basically blackmail Amazon into buying it from me), as well as general disorganization on the web brought about by these changes.

Sound scary? Well, there’s no reason to be afraid — many have tried and failed to organize the web, and it hasn’t ground to a halt yet. Funny enough, if we look at a bit of history, we can see that things weren’t really supposed to be this way in the first place.

Domains were originally supposed to be organized in a logical hierarchical structure that mimicked the way in which corporation and their subsidiaries were organized (it seems almost inconceivable now that anyone would want to organize things this way).

Like many other things in a (relatively) free market economy, domain names are also snapped up on a first-come, first-served basis — which to some, seems unfair. But could you imagine the real-world legal impliciations if you had to check with a lawyer before registering a domain?

Dropping the “www” or “http://” from address has now also become common — no one thinks of Amazon.com as “h-t-t-p-:-/-/-w-w-w-.-Amazon.com”. And why should they — the web has evolved to a point where we’re comfortable enough without the prefixes.

A certain amount of control over the web is always going to be necessary, but like all other human-created institutions, it is largely a place where we must self-regulate as a group. In some ways, the web is a society unlike any other, consisting of anonymous citizens who don’t really reside anywhere — but in many other ways, the web is a society that is much like every other. It is also a cumulative representation of all web-enabled societies on this planet.

And the web has evolved. It used to be something arcane that was incomprehensible to most people, and now it’s something we’re all inclined to take for granted. But if the history of this evolution has shown us anything, it’s that we’ll get comfortable with the newly-evolved state soon enough. I guess I better start saving up for lucasmcdonnell.blog.