ICANN, National Registrars Still Feuding

Damalloch writes: "The BBC website has this story about the EU's concern over ICANN's refusal to make guarantees about root server stability. Domain name registrars such as Nominet are threatening to withhold payment of ICAAN's fees unless something is done to reassure them. So far ICAAN has remained stubborn because of the huge lawsuit potential if a root server were to go down but with the possibility of having their income reduced, they might just be convinced to do something."

Comments

Well yes, but...

[johnburton]

But if one server went down wouldn't the requests just go to the other root servers instead? Isn't that how DNS works?

So presumably they've got decent machines and power supplies and connections for each server. And so the chance of one going down is quite low. The chance of enough of them going down at the same time to cause disaster has to be vanishingly small. If it's too big, add a few more servers.

Unless they include the possibility of them being hacked I suppose. But then they could just use several different operating systems and name server software to hugely reduce the chances.

I'm not sure I'm convinced that this is really the reason they won't give any guarantees, it seems like a reasonably safe thing to do to me.