I also think TLD's have jumped the shark. Let's abolish .com/.org/etc and force everybody to live in a more unified domain name space, so we're left with (at best), addresses like: www.google, graph.facebook, api.cnn, etc. The suffixes have been abused so much they are no longer reliable (see bit.ly that wildly popular Libyan website -- wait, what?), and even if there are people camping on foo.com's, we also have the problem where say foo.com and foo.net and foo.ly are all unrelated to one another and run by different people. Yes, legacy code, I understand, pain, etc. More of an idealistic rant. The increasing inelegance and hypocrisy and over-complexity of TLD's are getting to me just like the OA's author.
This makes it impossible to trust certain namespaces. If I go to a .gov or .gov.uk, for example, I know it's the official site. Where the hierarchical system is used (eg. .ac.uk and presumably .edu) it is still very useful.
Getting rid of the suffixes eliminates this and brings us down to the free-for-all level of the .com for all sites.
The same effect [as abolishing all TLDs] could be achieved in a backward compatible way by allowing arbitrary TLDs i.e., google, facebook, cnn would be TLDs in www.google, graph.facebook, api.cnn addresses.
Doesn't this reduce our available address space? What about all the sites that currently have three different entities at their .com, .net and .org addresses? What happens to ubuntu.com and ubuntu.org, two different groups? Where we are now, getting rid of TLDs would cause immense unnecessary conflict.
