That is one option, allowing people to own the domain names but also allow many websites to somehow have the same name (with the unique identifier being IP or s

That is one option, allowing people to own the domain names but also allow many websites to somehow have the same name (with the unique identifier being IP or similar). I've always been frustrated that the WWW URI doesn't support name-based virtual hosts in the authority section. While a name-based virtual host is usually specified as a domain name, it doesn't need to be. Many web sites share a single IP, so it should be possible to access them without requiring DNS resolution (examples showing name-based virtual host in brackets as one possible approach): http://[www.example.com]192.0.2.1/ http://[www.example.org]192.0.2.1/ http://[www.example.net]192.0.2.1/ http://[foo]192.0.2.1/ Or requiring DNS resolution: http://[www.example.org]www.example.com/ http://[foo]www.example.com/ Note that this doesn't serve the same purpose as a subdomain, because it allows one to explicitly specify the name-based virtual host to serve from a domain or IP address, instead of having a single part serve two very different purposes. Of course there are issues. For example, you could create URIs like: http://[www.google.com]192.0.2.1/ And SSL poses a challenge: https://[www.example.org]www.example.com/ https://[foo]www.example.com/ https://[www.example.com]192.0.2.1/ But from a technical perspective, this opens up a lot of possibilities. Currently, the only way to achieve this is to write your own headers when making a request, so it's already possible, just not supported in mainstream clients.