... idiot isps who configured route filters but did not bother to maintain them. darwin at work. the subject is uninteresting, as the study of stupidity is an exceedingly target-rich environment.
for those of us who are endlessly fascinated by watching evolution in action - what was the previous usage of 69/8 that led to those filters being installed?
(parenthesis: similar things have reportedly happened to people using .info for email - there turns out to be a number of MTAs in the world who have hardcoded all the non-2-letter TLDs, assuming "there will be no more", and routinely toss mail from/to the newer ones. They, too, deserve the pain they get; unfortunately they, like the route filterers, don't get all the pain they cause.)
See draft-klensin-name-filters-00.txt for a longer explanation of this issue and some cases other than mail-tossing. I'm working on a version that fills in the empty sections and clarifies anything that I can find that isn't clear; comments and suggestions welcome.
The evolutionary implications of this one are, however, somewhat less clear than those of the 69/8 case. In the 69/8 case, the ISPs who did the filtering were ultimately subject to attack by their own customers who, presumably, would sooner or later go elsewhere (or cause other harm to the ISP) if the problem wasn't fixed. An MTA-operator whom I'm paying to receive and deliver my mail is (or should be) subject to roughly the same pressures. But, in the TLD case, the victims are mostly those who have registered in the new domains and the help desks of registrars and unrelated servers, neither of whom have significant leverage on the offending ISPs in the non-MTA cases.
It might also be part of a good case for not creating new gTLDs except where they are needed for technical reasons (pretty much a null set), but please hold any discussion on that subject on the whining-at-ICANN list of your choice. Spending excessive time on that one of course leads to another example of evolution in action :-(.
john
