yesterday, at icann's public forum in cape town, an interesting conflict accidentally came up, even if somewhat concealed by the usual exchange of well-known views on whether icann should finally allow the world to get more new tlds on a regular basis.

i know i am oversimplifying thoughts and positions, but basically the discussion was between a couple of 30-year-old engineers from the floor asking to be given the opportunity to try new things, and a couple of 60-year-old engineers from the podium putting up any kind of unproven excuses and plain sets of supercazzole con scappellamento a destra to prevent that from happening.

i am not saying that there is no need for caution in adding new domains to the root zone, but let's be clear: from a technical standpoint, if we could send a man to the moon, and also run a DNS zone with 30 million registrations in it, i can't see any reasonable problem in having thousands of domain names at the root level (unless i can get some really credible technical explanation, of which i cannot think at the moment, and which no one up to date ever provided).

so why are these well respected (and i do respect and esteem them a lot!) fathers of the internet opposing new additions to the root zone? are they secretly being paid by verisign? not at all.

my guess would be that they might be victims of a well known malady that affects all brilliant engineers (and also some not brilliant ones, like myself): the so-called nih syndrome.

that derives from the fact that engineering, and particularly system architecture design, makes you effectively a god. you take a piece of scratch paper, you write some lines and boxes, et voilą: fiat lux. and so, much like gallia omnis divisa in partes tres, thy domains be divided in com/net/org/gov/mil/edu/int, and so be it.

but then, fifteen years later, younger engineers come and tell you that your lines and boxes (or, in this case, your partitions of the generic domain name space) are no longer fit, since they would like to add new partitions. i can just imagine, if i were the person who designed that!

i mean, from the engineering point of view, what kind of sense does "biz" make, since we already have "com"? and what about "aero"? they should be a subset of dot com, right? "technically", all of this doesn't make sense - it's just those bad marketing guys who always try to mess things up with irrelevant questions such as "nice, but what is it for?" or "why did we spend 48 man-years to remake our product with a new architecture and programming language, if now it's doing the very same things it was doing before?".

to be honest, "technically" almost everything makes sense. yes, there are design choices that work well and other that don't work as well, but i've rarely encountered systems that were such a failure in design terms not to be able to meet any functionality requirement - while i've encountered many more which were technically perfect, but were left sleeping in a closet because they weren't meeting any kind of actual user need.

this is why engineering solutions are not carved in stone, and young engineers have always been eating up old engineers since <insert your favourite godperson here> gave engineering to the world. that's not because the old solutions were better than the new ones, or the opposite, but because new needs and new expectations arose among the users of the technology.

so, even being an engineer and having suffered much from being constantly treated by non-engineer colleagues as a commodity, i'm starting to think that the only answer that old engineers should be allowed to utter whenever some user comes up with a new need or a new way to use the internet is "yes, sir".

or at most, "do you want me with fries, sir?".