I’d like to believe it isn’t a sign of the beginning of a downhill slide, but I’m afraid it is: El Reg used to be nasty but funny, but any more they’re just nasty, mean, and wrong. Take that article, for instance: they were completely wrong about what was actually released, which was to show punycode by default (www.xn--pypal-4ve.com rather than http://www.paypal.com) rather than the original plan of turning off IDNs, their “simplest and clearest example” (borrowed from the CENTR statement they link) is a crock (try typing paypaI.com in your addressbar, and see if it’s a good spoof after the uppercase I turns into lowercase), and the “expert solutions” they link at the end consist of being provincial, and telling the registrars to shape up and follow the rules they were supposed to follow all along; exactly what Mozilla and Opera were saying. I’m afraid the Register has just gotten so fond of the sound of their own nasty voice that they don’t bother checking facts, they just repeat anything they’ve heard.

Oh, did you mean Mozilla’s arrogance? That was just a figment of Kieren McCarty’s imagination.