Either they will fail, or they will break the Internet.

n Paris this week Vinton Cerf, Father of the Internet, said Sunday that he feared the network’s addressing system would break down if “political gambits” by international groups or national agencies interfere with plans to expand the languages used in domain names. Welcome to the highly complex politics centered around the United Nations.At the first session ever of the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum, (IGF), Cerf said national interests had surfaced in recent weeks that would change the process for “internationalizing” Internet addresses.

Cerf noted that ICANN has moved forward on using non- Latin characters in domain names, but several large movers and shakers prefer to take another direction.

“My concern is the potential for suddenly choosing another path after ICANN has already put in six years of work on this,” said Cerf,. “Either they will fail, or they will break the Internet,” or at least Cerf vision of the Internet.

At the heart of the latest split is the issue of allowing non-Western characters to be used in Internet addresses. At present, only 37 characters can be used; ICANN is gradually implementing a plan that would expand that set to tens of thousands of characters from all of the world’s languages.

Already, several Asian character sets have been approved, but ICANN has not signed off on a system for using international symbols for the part of the Internet address that represents the top-level domain, such as .com or .net or .jp.

Cerf and other ICANN officials say that what they see as a careful and considered approach is being construed by others as stalling (wonder where they got that idea) or an attempt to undermine the use of foreign, non-English characters.

Specific-language interest groups may be “willing to accept a system that works in Country X and aren’t worried that it won’t work in Country Y,” he said. The current policies of China, or a North Korea, would be the best example.

When that happens, the uniformity of the Internet addressing system - the mechanism that allows one computer to reliably find another anywhere on the network - breaks down and fractures into separate networks that can no longer universally communicate, said Cerf.