DNS to lose relevance around the edges?
As noted elsewhere, the trend for url free advertisements for web sites is growing. Relying on high search engine rankings for your product name is clearly a risky business, but let’s assume you have it nailed. Do you still need to line the pockets of a domainer?
Well, DNS is often employed as a load balancing technique for heavily trafficked sites, so having search engine results direct to a domain would typically be a good thing. But that load balancing service could potentially be replaced with the help of a chunky EC2 instance sitting up front directing requests, and an elastic IP address - an IP address which is dynamically reassigned e.g. in case of instance failure.
So, assuming that Google’s ranking algorithm doesn’t penalise domain free sites, how long before we see a website launch that simply ignores domains and DNS and relies exclusively on search engine ranking?