Actually, link shorteners are just a symptom of the problem. The problem is the DNS system itself. It is the reason that your email address gets spammed, and t

Actually, link shorteners are just a symptom of the problem. The problem is the DNS system itself. It is the reason that your email address gets spammed, and the reason that you can DDOS websites, etc. DNS is a glorified search engine, and it is only really used for root urls like mydomain.tld . It's pretty much only good in two contexts: 1) for when people dictate a specific domain name verbally to someone, and even then, spelling errors can occur. 2) advertising a URL somewhere to a landing site. But you can just use a QR code that people can scan, or a link in a webpage. Everything else may as well be at non-human-readable domain names, in which case you can even use distributed hash tables instead of DNS. Perhaps one day browsers will allow plugins realize their own schemas, such as ipfs://hjkldfjhsdfkjgsdhfgsdf and the plugin would do the routing instead of DNS. Is that currently possible with standard browser extensions?