> This is pretty similar to URIs, which were defined very openly, and where for instance http(s):// took over gopher:// and ftp://
Urls were defined way after all those things, and were predominately created by the http people. I don't think its similar at all, and regardless, compared to the actual http (or gopher or ftp) protocol, the url syntax is the least interesting part.
A better example perhaps is `www` or `mail` or `news`. Or magnet links. Or JWT on top of JSON.
In the era of The Information Superhighway, the World Wide Web, and spinning Netscape comets, people were quite ok standardizing on `www` as a prefix that used dns to route your web traffic to the web server. Meanwhile, AOL had a concrete use case of "keywords" that monopolized tv ad time for half a decade and went nowhere.
The web is full of standards that exist on top of other standards. This standard allows people to name things. People will figure out how to make interesting use cases with names without a central authority finding pre-existing use cases.
Urls were defined way after all those things, and were predominately created by the http people. I don't think its similar at all, and regardless, compared to the actual http (or gopher or ftp) protocol, the url syntax is the least interesting part.