| | AUGUST 201919CIOReviewThe Internet has experienced explosive growth over the last 20 years. In 1995, there were only 18,000 websites; by 2010, there were more than 80 million dot com domain names alone. In addition, the number and types of domain names has also increased beyond "dots" such as dot com, dot edu and dot org to hundreds of new types of suffix endings. In the last three years alone, there has been an increase of nearly 25 million new domains that use the new domain name endings, many of which are suffixes that speak to people's interests and affiliations (such as .COLLEGE, .RIO and .EARTH, among many others) or are in languages other than English (such as . or .). This considerable growth, while rife with opportunities for both individuals and organizations, has fundamentally changed the infrastructure of the Internet.But while the infrastructure has changed the software that supports Internet-enabled applications, devices and systems and software has not--it is still based on rules set up more than 20 years ago.This causes problems for organizations and headaches for users because if the systems do not recognize or appropriately process the new domain names or email addresses that use THE NEXT BILLION INTERNET USERS: WHAT CIOS NEED TO KNOWBy Ashwin Rangan, SVP Engineering & CIO, ICANN
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