Babel on the Web

I love the Bible, for all sorts of reasons. One is that if you take the time to dig around, so much of it is gloriously off-message for just about all varieties of religion that would claim otherwise. The Old Testament in particular is full of stories of unruliness by gods and men that in no way matches the versions dispensed from pulpits, and if you know your Genesis you can have much innocent fun at the expense of the holy.

Another is that this unruliness is still everywhere to be foun, and it's engaging to read about Bronze Age tribes behaving no differently from us space age sophisticates. Take the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). You may have some vague memories of this from Sunday School - mankind gets it into its head to build a tower to reach Heaven, God gets annoyed at the cheek of it all and knocks it over. Moreover, just to make sure it doesn't happen again, the Lord makes it so that no man can understand another, creating the mess of languages that to this day keep translators in fine wine (I've never met a translator who doesn't appreciate the stuff).

And lo, it has come to pass that the same thing's happening on the Web. Yesterday, ICANN warned that attempts to make Web addresses truly multilingual could permanently break the network. With some 6000 languages extant, it's extraordinarily difficult to keep URLs unique and workable in any script. In particular, the danger is that addresses will have to be separately registered for each language - which means that something like www.google.com would not only need thousands of individual registrations, but that some might not point to Google at all. If this messes up, the effect will be exactly analogous to the collapse of the Tower of Babel; a great effort by mankind to build something that reaches beyond our self-imposed limits, cast into confusion and madness.

Extraordinarily difficult to avoid - but not impossible. Get it right - an heirarchy of entities, with a unique web site sitting at the apex of a resolution layer that coalesces the six thousand ways to get to it - and we'll have a model to unify knowledge that brings good database design to the sum of human achievements for the very first time. Really, there'll be nothing that can't be found. Get it wrong, and it's back to Genesis.

And back at Genesis, there's one further warning. Rereading it, one finds that the reason God reacted so badly wasn't through pique, but through something that reads remarkably like fear. "Lo! They are one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they have commenced to do. Now, will it not be withheld from them, all that they have planned to do?". In other words, we were storming heaven, preparing to overturn the natural order of divine right, and that alarmed the big man.

Not that I'm saying that there may be those who see a universal Web as something equally threatening - nor that they might prefer to see it descend into a nice, manageable chaos.

But there are, and they might. Let's hope ICANN keeps a cool head and ignores any whispers of divine retribution. We only get one crack at this every four thousand years. Shame to mess it up again.