I think you didn't even need to quote the second sentence. Is there another successful online bookstore? It's the rare brick-and-mortar bookstore that's financially sustainable.
All it takes is for Amazon to do a big marketing campaign and teach users that typing "horror.books" or "action.movies" to cause real problems to other retailers. People search google in google because they don't understand how the internet works, if an advert from Amazon explained how "action.movies" was a way to find action movies and "anything.movies" works too then you can guarantee behaviour will change.
If http://74.125.225.68/ ranks before a .book domain when you type whatever in your browser edit box. Then that's where most people will be going to. Doesn't mean domains are meaningless, but they mean very little, and the better google gets, the less they'll mean in the future.
This is weird: a Google search for that "2a00:..." string [1] results in a link to what looks like this page, but hosted on 13l.blork.ly. What's up with that?
He means un savy users will literally type "google" into the URL bar (not understanding that typing a string there will google it) and click on the first result to get to google. Then they perform the query they originally intended
That's just one example. There have been plenty of startups, particularly in the consumer internet space, in which the names were generally accepted to be critical to the startups' successes. Mint vs. Wesabe is the most obvious example.
Domain names are a useful abstraction away from IP addresses for some people.
I agree with you that many people are not sure about domain names (they don't know what the http:// is, or what the www (or whatever) before the domain name means, or what the TLD represents) - and this is supported by some of the measures that have gone to protecting users from bad actors. Bind updates to protect against unicode exploits; highlighting the address bar to emphasise https connections; and so on.
Gently scummy efforts by other people have benefited from the mistakes people make; redirecting to ad-laden search pages by ISPs is one pretty bad example.
So, do domain names need another level of abstraction? Or is it broken and does it need a redesign? What could you do?
I want to run an online bookstore. Dare I say I want to start an amazon competitor.
Well now amazon owns .books -- Amazon owns books on the internet.
That is bullshit.