I'm sorry to play this card, but this is the (Tower of Babel)[<a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Genesis#11:5" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Genesis#11:...</a>] all over again.<p>Perhaps the analogy is unnecessary, or even harmful, to make. But typically I have been taught, or rather I have learned by direct method, that some Christians believe BIBLE is an abbreviation, albeit a cheeky one, for "Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth".<p>Often I wonder what the "imperative mood" of this document is supposed to be. Obviously it is not descriptive qua scientific authorship. We shouldn't assume this, surely, since a sophisticated method of science had not been yielded to the Hebrews of that time, etc. But yet it struggles, and seemingly succeeds, at preserving its descriptive weight, as vacuous as it is, in a time of reason and science. So we claim that it is allegory and tale. And so what if is? What is it describing? Like Aristotle, I believe, it describes a cycle of civilization: humanity's response to itself.<p>Obviously "God" in the story of the Tower of Babel is nothing more than the height of political force of Shinar. It responds to what they have built. So here we see the "confounding" of their language; like in our time, a confounding of the DNS system. What motivates this story? To what end does it serve?<p>Surely the U.S. government seeks to bolster the economy through its will, by "securing" our economic creativity. For "now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do."<p>As we can clearly see this is a response to Otto Neurath, the Logical Positivists, the adoption of ideal, scientific and pragmatic languages, etc. Neurath sought to liberate the proletariat of his time through a technological mode of thought applied to language: complex symbols efficiently characterized such that they might contain chains of propositions. The illiterate worker thus might be informed through a proximity of symbol to nature. Today, we see this with technology: big-face-hypermodern-informational-UIs-with-geriatric-buttons, usability research, cognitive-neuroscience centered on atypical neuropathologies, the mobile web, Helvetica, etc.<p>The U.S. will respond as it should, and I play this card because, in the end, the only argument we face from politicians is an uncritical one: _what we've been doing works, so it must work_. How much influence these governments have on ICANN is unclear to me, but given the list of possible TLDs; e.g., pepsi, etc., it isn't tough to reach for the assumption.