stuid question, but isn't 2004010101 (today) > 1076370400 (9 Feb 2004)?
This doesn't apply here. It is perfectly possible to decrease the value of your serial number without any consequences for the DNS slave/master zone transfers, if you adhere to the procedures put forward in RFC 1912 (section 3.1). The fact that the newly introduced serial is lower will thus not have any consequences from this perspective.
Yes, but we all know there are quite some non-compliant dns-servers out there. Do they want to break the largest zone for a few days for all non-compliant servers?
Oh, wait, right, they don't care if they break stuff...
And all this matters because.. ? The serial number is used by the slaves, everyone else (ISPs) are only interested in the expiry which is 1 week. Verisign can force all the slaves to reload the zone and hence eliminate the old format instantly. Afaik all subdomains of the gtlds have their own SOAs so it wont affect any of those and if you're running a stealth slave well this is your notification! Steve