DNS snafu causes worldwide Web meltdown. (Network Solutions' domain name systems administration fails) (Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)

Last week an employee at Network Solutions, a Herndon, Va.-based company that runs InterNIC's DNS under an agreement with the U.S. National Science Foundation, unwittingly caused a computer to send corrupted files to servers around the world that handle domain names.

The mistake caused messages to be returned to senders and also cut off access to U.S. Web sites for some users.

The incident underscored the rationale -- as the Internet grows in size and in global reach, the traditional mechanisms for handling key resources have not grown with it -- behind one proposal for a new DNS framework.

"We've reached the limit of this old boys' network's ability to …