AOL pretends to be the internet
Remember AOL keywords? They basically had their own private DNS alternative. Every commercial on TV for a website would say "AOL keyword !" instead of the actual URL. I guess it was a lot less scary for your average internet user to type in "nick" instead of "http://www.nick.com". I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem. I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably Google) for a specific phrase, and buying the adwords for that is more or less the modern equivalent of paying for an AOL keyword. Search was really rough back then (although it's gone full circle into shit again I feel), and the URL bar UX wasn't quite figured out yet. Will users be able to adapt to wacky new TLDs or will we be stuck with .com forever because it's recognizable as a domain name? Do people still type "www."? Is the app store the modern equivalent of AOL channels? Sometimes I wonder if we're stuck in an infinite cycle of reinventing AOL.