IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

Back in 2003 when Verisign stunk up the web with controversy over sitefinder, Mark McLaughlin posted a fairly well linked article to news.com calling the technical communities ( root-delegation-only) and ICANN ( a slap down ) response to the changes a stiffling of innovation on the Internet. One thing Mark missed, and I hope GC keeps in the very forefront of their decision making is that the Internet is also no longer just a place for people with web browsers. Mucking with the lowest level plumbing makes things like semantic web, xml exchanges, (think schema validation), voip,  p2p, and email (spam filtering) more difficult to develop and implement. These are very real innovations with very real economic and cultural impacts.

If the intent is to improve the customer brower experience then let the improvements be done in the browser where they have no impact on other services.