"Hey, check out my amazon shop at coolstuff dot amazon"
"coolstuff dot amazon dot com?"
"No coolstuff dot amazon"
"huh?"
Com stands for commercial, amazon shouldn't need their own domain to sell stuff.
EDIT: commercial, not commerce
Even now, while I have my lastname.com that pre-dates that business by several years, I still have to spell out my e-mail address, often several times, to people who know my name. Trying to short-circuiting that process with "it's just my firstname at my lastname dot com" rarely works, and often ends up with them asking if is at gmail.com or something. So I dutifully spell it out, and many people noticeably don't make the connection between the domain name and my lastname even after they've written it down.
Familiarity is often far simpler.
It's a good email address, custom domains for email addresses are somewhat rare and often end up being more confusing than helpful. Unless it is support at domain dot com or info at domain dot com.
Not for personal addresses facing the general public though, I wouldn't think. Even something as simple as "My firstname at domain dot com" you'll end up spelling out the domain one time out of two whether you've been talking about it - or not.
On the other hand, almost everyone I want to give my email address to over the phone will just use it for marketing, so I give them a gmail one and let the NSA index my spam.
"You mean 2245 Azure St."
"No 2245 Azure Bluff"
I don't see a different here. There's nothing special about .com. Plus, it's not going to scale anyways. Why not have arbitrary TLDs? There's no technical reason why this is an issue.
Your comment is written like you've never ventured outside of the tech industry.
This is beside OP's point. This is a human problem; not a technical one.
The state of .com today is the future of other TLDs in the future.
That problem will be made much worse much sooner if the owners of TLDs like .shop or .phone aren't required to allow second-level registration.
Out of 300 ways extracted from address database I see about 40 entries (counted by hand, too lazy to build a proper query) being very alike. Luckily, most names decline and "street" and, say, "boulevard" have different grammatical gender, so it's harder to make a mistake.
Why yes, Mr Vanbrugh[1] did live in the castle on the corner...
address says "Sokolska 20". Okay, let's guess from the other metadata that the city is actually "Prague" and not "Ostrava". No such house number at this address, perhaps should have been "sokolOVska 20, Prague"? Wonderful, that exists, solv- oh wait, do we have two different houses with the same house number? We do, multiple clicks apart, and both are legally correct.
In other words, that's a very good example you've used, exactly because it shows the underlying assumptions as faulty.
I know if someone verbally tells me a URL I am not going to remember what it was, or even that I should go to it.
"amazon.sketchysite.cn"? Seems legit!
said no one ever.
To illustrate that point, would you ask someone to send you the link if they had mentioned "shop.com"? What if it were "book.shop" or "teddybear.store"?
I have a smartphone within a few feet of me much more often than pen & paper.
Sometimes a site gets brought up in conversation, (hey, I found this site called HN with a bunch of neat tech information on it), and it's just not important enough to stop the flow of conversation right then and there. Later while you're looking in the fridge you realize, hey, that actually was sort of interesting. What was that site again? hn.com? hacker.news? What's this ycombinator thing, that can't be right.
A. Humans don't live on a geological timescale
B. .com TLD's are in the formidable first ~15 years of socializing the web the mass public.
Also, in regards to gp, saying .com is for all commercial companies is the equivalent of saying all commercial companies have to be in business with Verisign.
I'd be for abolising .com (and other gtlds) too.
Also, if you think about what the world might be like 50 years from now, ".com" and ".org" might be remnants of the past we remember fondly. They will likely become less important on their own.
The only real problem as far as I see it with cctlds is that it reinforces the notion that you must pick a country to be subservient to, but you aren't really escaping that by using gtlds..
The fact single companies manage TLDs doesn't factor into my thought process on how we should manage the TLD namespace.
It sounds like your problem is really with Verisign et al., perhaps the fight you're looking for is how individual gTLDs are managed in the first place, not assuming that part of the model is fixed and exploding the namespace in some bizarro business fairness.
As far as I am concerned I see no reason not to have thousands or millions of top level domains.
I am a believer that with ample time and more options we will see the false assumption that everything is a .com become less widespread. (Although this belief is largely based on wishful thinking, I will admit)