And I keep getting surprised by customers and friends that have never, ever knowingly used a URL – they search on “http://www.google.com/” to take two steps to get to the site. Whether they use Bing, or Yahoo, or any other search engine.

Recently I put up a new site, without a domain name, for the customer to review progress. I emailed the URL – and got a complaint, that the URL “didn’t work”. It traced down to – Microsft search didn’t find the URL, when the customer used his usual navigation process. As far as I could tell, until that day the customer had never knowingly used the address bar for entering a domain or URL.

I am sure that the music and movie industries would be delighted to enforce paid navigation on everyone, as well as the advertisers and merchants wanting captive audiences. It would be like telling a newcomer to town, “Nope. This is the only road in town; it goes to Wal-Mart over there, and back that way is Conoco. It don’t go nowhere else.”

It seems that a sizeable portion of the Internet public won’t understand the concern you raise, perhaps even after the ability to use “raw” URL’s is denigrated or disabled.