Icann, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is quickly earning the nickname "I can't."
The organization that manages the address system on the Internet was forced to temporarily take offline last night the public roster of 1,930 applicants for new top-level domain names until it could remove the applicants' personal contact information (including home addresses).
Though Icann fixed this latest mistake quickly, it's just one more snafu dogging its controversial plan to introduce thousands of new top-level domain names to the Internet. During the application process, Icann was compelled to take its system offline for more than a month after it leaked the file names and user names of some applicants.
"We apologize for this oversight," Icann said in a brief statement.
Icann revealed the list of the 1,930 applications Wednesday at a press conference in London to much fanfare and hyperbole. If all goes as planned, 1,000 new TLDs such as .home or .baby could hit the Internet early next year.
The process did not come cheap for those that applied. Each application cost $185,000, netting Icann more than $350 million to manage the new TLDs. Maybe it's time to get some better project management.