The Difficulty Of Running The Internet

from the it-ain't-easy dept

News.com is running an interview with Vint Cerf where he tries to explain why ICANN has done some of the things it's done. He basically says that their job is to help manage any changes to the "core" of the internet. He points out that the basic internet architecture made it easy to add new functionality at the edges, but core changes can cause a lot of problems, and their job is to minimize those problems. For example, he claims that certain software applications are still having trouble with the new top level domains they added, because some of them (such as .aero and .info) are longer than three characters. Because older TLDs were all two or three characters some people wrote software that assumed all TLDs would always be limited to three characters. Of course, that seems more like a problem at the edges than at the core. It was the software that was poorly written. He also doesn't give a very good rationale for only approving a few TLDs, rather than opening up the process for any TLD. Sure, he points out that one software problem - but those are the types of things that would get fixed pretty quickly. Wouldn't it make more sense to create a standard policy for TLDs rather than just arbitrarily approving a few?