Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

From the Department of What’s The Worst That Can Happen?, Vanity Domains division: ICANN, the organization that’s selling do-it-yourself replacements for .com for $185,000 each, is meeting this week in Durban, South Africa, and hopes to start letting the vanity domains go live by late summer. Critics say the untested new domains could cause problems, but the Washington Post on Monday (July 15) quoted one of the most specifically chilling predictions about the rollout from Jeffrey Moses, ICANN’s own chief security officer.

“It’s not like it’s a runaway train without recourse,” Moss told the newspaper. “We’re not going to do anything that harms the security or stability of the Internet.” Well, except that some internal corporate systems will malfunction as new domains are created, Moss added—and that will be their problem to deal with, not ICANN’s. “We want everything to work, and we’re going to try to make everything work, but we can’t control everybody’s networks on the planet,” he said. However, the number of domains likely to cause problems is a “really, really small number.” Note: It’s the number of problem-causing domains that will be small, not the torpedoed corporate systems, which are potentially unlimited. Thanks—we feel so much better now.