Re: Stability of the Internet?

[Ariel Biener <ariel () fireball tau ac il>]

On Fri, 18 May 2001, Tim Langdell, PhD wrote:



 Hrmm, I don't know if this is a perfectly good example of how the
"stability" of the Internet is gonna be affected.

 In my most humble opinion, I think it means that the addition of these
new >3 letters gTLDs will not be transparent to users. This is due to many
factors, among those are software writers. I believe that there are many
software packages that will fumble when they encounter >3 gTDLs, and some
have the com/net/org/k12/edu/mil/gov (and sometimes `int' too) hardcoded
as the "legal" gTLDs. This means that these software packages will
actually break, and will need to be updated, patched, or replaced, if the
software vendor is either no longer in existance, or for example, a
software version for your particular OS is no longer manufactured or
supported (there are many examples of that in the academic world for
instance).

my 2 cents,

--Ariel

> There has been much talk of the introduction of new TLDs -- either new
> ICANN/DoC ones or those of the likes of New.Net -- affecting the "stability"
> of the Internet. And yet so far on all the lists, not just this one, I have
> not seen a single exampleof how the "stability" would or could be affected
> by such introductions. Can anyone give me even one example?
>
> Tim

--
Ariel Biener
e-mail: ariel () post tau ac il
PGP(6.5.8) public key http://www.tau.ac.il/~ariel/pgp.html