On Thursday, an employee at Network Solutions, a company in Virginia that runs InteNIC's DNS under an agreement with the U.S. National Science Foundation, mistakenly sent corrupted files to the servers around the world that handle domain name resolution. As a result, millions of users were denied Internet access for a couple of hours.
This incident highlights the problems with the current DNS system and gives new attention to a new DNS system now under consideration.
"We've reached the limit of this old boys' network's ability to function with the world outside," said John Perry Barlow, co-founder and vice chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Next week, a self-appointed committee will meet to brainstorm an overhaul to the aging DNS system