Roger Kay would like to see ICANN slow down, Kay has written about the new gtld program on Forbes a few times. Today he is out with an article that basically says ICANN should hit the brakes. The greatest expansion so far is confusion. He discusses compatability problems and names not working universally on every platform and every device.
From the article:
One of the biggest problems is compatibility. That is, a lot of the new domain names don’t work with existing devices and software. Browsers don’t handle the new suffixes consistently or as expected, mail systems sometimes reject them as invalid, and some enterprise software generates unpredictable errors, which may requiring significant revisions to fix.
At an ICANN meeting in Singapore in February, a working group charged with sorting out the problem of “universal acceptance” admitted that the prospect of mass incompatibility is scary. Brent London, Google GOOGL +2.26%’s representative in the working group, put it pretty straightforwardly: “New types of domains and email addresses break stuff. Just to send an email from one person to another, you’d find yourself in a situation where an operating system, mail servers, routers, mail service providers, security software, all need to work properly.” And with the new suffixes, sometimes they don’t.
The industry is facing these problems because most software, device drivers, and firmware were written before this new explosion in complexity, when domains had only two- or three-character suffixes. Because there were fewer of them, and they were more uniform, the old suffixes were easier to test and support. Previously, expansions in the number of domains occurred slowly, over a duration of years, and were limited to just a few at a time. As hundreds of new domains have come on stream this year with suffixes of arbitrary length — like .photography — and in different scripts — like .网址 — this complexity has become unmanageable.
Read the full article on Forbes
