intertwingly

Tim Bray: I’m not sure whether this free-TLD idea is a good or bad thing in the big picture

When I was a young’un, telephone area codes in North America had a zero or a one a the middle digit, and none of the exchanges in such area codes had such.  This enabled telephone switching equipment to detect whether the number you were dialing was a local or long distance number without requiring a one to be dialed first.  Eventually, phone numbers became scarce, and this was ditched.

This meant that the PBX equipment in a number of locations were unable to make calls to these new numbers, and had to be replaced.

The modern equivalent of this may be email addresses.  Consider the fun that will occur when existing software is presented with email addresses that contain non-latin characters.