It's not the same issue at all, in that domains with different suffixes are controlled by different people while foo.com and www.foo.com are controlled by the same people.
If you have an example of somebody who needs to serve different web content for foo.com and www.foo.com, I look forward to seeing it. But I've never seen one, and when I've seen it happen accidentally it's due to idiocy.
> while foo.com and www.foo.com are controlled by the same people
Sometimes. Far from always.
In some environments, `www` may be under an entirely different administrative domain, with lesser authority than the top level domain which is delegating web services to the `www` group by way of creating a dns record and/or adding an http(s) redirect to the parent domain.
Having some string values arbitrarily considered trivial is dangerous.
See:
lbl.gov has address 128.3.41.146
vs
www.lbl.gov has address 35.196.135.136
The root domain points to hosts at the lab. The subdomain has been delegated off to Google.
This may be true for LBL, but it's not necessarily so. They don't serve different content, and I don't see anything running on lbl.gov that couldn't be handled.
These string values are already considered equivalent, which is why Chrome is making this change, and why every reasonable site has one redirect to the other.
It's due to different groups controlling different parts of the infrastructure, allowing for separation of privilege -- and is the whole reason www even existed to begin with.
Often these separate groups aren't part of the same organization. They're a different organization or contractor paid to maintain a web presence.
Yes, but those are decisions made by whoever controls foo.com. This may not be a good decision by Google, but I don't think they should be held responsible for a decision that was made by whoever controls foo.com.
Either way, www.example.com and example.com can differ in terms of IP address, underlying hardware, actual website content, and probably other things I don’t know. They are different URLs. It seems problematic to assume they are the same.
Not at all. People already assume they are the same. And they have for 20 years. Nobody reasonable serves up different content on the two URLs. Anybody clueful redirects one to the other. The only reason they're separate is that a) the web wasn't dominant when it was introduced, and b) technology of the time made it hard to manage traffic in ways we can now.
The 9th comment is explicitly described as "bad results"; it's about somebody who doesn't have a redirect. So that for me is in the "unreasonable" category.
The 3rd is about pool.ntp.org, which is a random ntp server, and which shouldn't be serving up web content. They did happen to pick www.pool.ntp.org as the URL for the docs on the NTP Pool Project, but if "www" never was a thing, the would have happily picked something else. E.g. poolproject.ntp.org or ntp.org/pool/ would have been fine.
I realize it is an important distinction, I'm glad you do as well.
Just as ftp.mysite.com is not mysite.com and mysite.com in not mysite.io and http://mysite.com is not https://mysite.com. You get the point.
They are all different and important in my opinion. Any argument that hiding the "www." part makes it easier for the user is equally applicable (and wrong) to ".com"
You can keep repeating your point, but if you want to convince me, you'll have to actually address my demonstration that the two are in fact not equal in practice.
I'm not arguing for Chrome's implementation. I'm saying we should do the more useful but harder thing of just not using "www" as a thing in browser URLs. They have correctly identified it as redundant, but instead tried to fix it by being too clever.
As I mention elsewhere, the first two are bad examples. (In fact. ntppool.org and www.ntppool.org are the same thing.) The third is a hack from the era where responsive design, browser sniffing, and polyfills didn't exist. It should probably die too, but doesn't have to here. The m.tumblr.com name is distinct from tumblr.com and is of the form I think better. Note that they didn't use www.m.tumblr.com.
If you have an example of somebody who needs to serve different web content for foo.com and www.foo.com, I look forward to seeing it. But I've never seen one, and when I've seen it happen accidentally it's due to idiocy.