ICANN Won't Get DNS Root Servers

daria42 writes "The US Department of Commerce has reversed its original decision on the Internet's root DNS servers, which would have eventually seen them pass into the hands of ICANN. While the original decision would have seen ICANN take full responsibility after it met a number of conditions, the new declaration means Commerce would keep that control, regardless of whether and when those conditions are met. It is possible that some countries could withdraw support from ICANN, and this decision even opens up the gate for a separate DNS system to be established outside the US's control."

Comments

Read the actual statement

[Ingolfke]

Don't interact w/ a summarized article. Read the actual statement from the US government. I wish these news sites would link to their sources when they're available.

Re:Fine by me.

[iamwahoo2]

Aren't there already a number of "free" root servers that are under non-govermnental or non-verisign control? There is nothing prohibiting changing to new root servers other than just getting people to bother making the switch

http://www.orsn.org/

Re:On the fence

[swimin]

How about using something that already exists, like opennic?

It is a currently running, non-profit organization that provides its own set of root DNS servers. They resolve all of the official domains(with the exception of .biz, because there is a dispute over it), and several others, like .oss (open source software).

Uh, no...

[A beautiful mind]

You got it almost right, but it works like this:

The ISP nameserver has a huge cache with a timeout. If a record cannot be found (because it hasn't been cached before or it has been discarded because of the timeout) then it goes to resolve the domain. To resolve the domain, you actually go backwards (from a higher hierarchy to lower), thus:

root -> country level -> domain level

...not the other way around. The whole thing starts with the dns servers, they are Archimedes' one (13) fixed points the whole dns revolves around.

Re:Change the DNS system!

[TheRaven64]

The root servers are almost never actually used. All they do is let querying servers find the DNS server for a particular top level domain (e.g. .com). These are updated very infrequently (every year or so), and so their contents are cached by every DNS cache in existence. If the root DNS servers vanished hardly anyone would notice for quite a while.

A study a few months back showed that 97% of all queries to the root servers came from people who have mis-typed the top level domain.

I don't really care who controls the root servers, as long as they are all reliable and situated sufficiently far apart that they are not affected by geographical problems.

Re:Redundancy is good

[AndroidCat]

Those are the logical servers. The physical servers for five of the roots have multiple locations. (But that might just be a building across town for some of them.) The Wiki claims that As a result most of the physical, rather than nominal, root servers are now outside the United States. And if it's in a Wiki, it must be true, right? ;)