http://news.com.com/2008-7347-5092590.html Quotes Stratton Sclavos: "The DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks last October on the root system--hey, there are 13 global copies of that, and they're all operating. It should scare people that nine of the 13 went down. It's time for the Internet infrastructure to go commercial. On the core services of the infrastructure, it's time to pull the root servers away from volunteers who run them out of a university or lab or some other level. That's going to be an unpopular decision." This factoid has been proven false multiple times, in multiple forums over the last year. Its incredible that a CEO of a company that claims DNS expertise wouldn't know this was false. One particular "internet security" company was PINGing the root servers, and some of the root server operators turned off ping. The root servers themselves were unaffected (except maybe one operated by the US Military). Historically, the only wide-spread failures have been due to NSI operators screwing up the COM or NET zone files. Historically, the other network operators have needed to pick up the load when NSI fell down. NSI controls two root servers. Perhaps its time to split those up among different organizations. There is no reason why NSI must operate any root name severs. NSI moved all the COM and NET zones to seperate GTLD servers controlled SOLELY by NSI years ago.