I guess the moon is in phase with some star somewhere, and now it's time to argue who's root is he "real" root... Barf. Enough already - we all have our own roots. one guy follows Vixies roots, while I typically roll my own. Many others do other things.
The final point of this insanity is that there is NOT a single root. Hasn't been for a hell of a long time, and I suspect that there never will be again.
I have never seen any alternative root that got more than a few percent visibility penetration, other than Kashpureff's "Go Directly To Jail, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200" trick. While some of you may consider it a victory if you and your two friends can see your private TLDs, the inability of the vast bulk of internet users to resolve your TLDs seems to argue that they're not particularly useful. If your customers can't advertise it to Worldcom and AOL and Mindspring and Earthlink customers (as a representative example set), and you intend to be general purpose, and as far as I can tell none of the alternatives have ever been able to, then you're masturbating rather than crafting serious net policy. This mailing list does not exist to discuss experiments in alternative DNS, if you have not figured out how to surmount the combined political and technical barriers required for general purpose use of those alternative TLDs. -george william herbert gherbert@retro.com