At 05:21 AM 11/19/01 +0000, you wrote:
Once we start down the slippery slope of "I'm a root too", how many different ad hoc DNS "universes" (for lack of better term) must we have before we decide that things are "broken"?
Two. That happened back in 1996 when the IANA TLD applicants began getting their glue added to AlterNIC. Today lack of entry in the root has created a dozen or so more alt.roots. Now people are beginning to notice the consequences (i.e. the .US zone is now causing cache pollution outside the legacy root since it's using the ICANN .BIZ name servers - and that .BIZ isn't recognized by all the alt.roots). But it's OK. Really. There's only one root. Honest. Except for this one, which is being run with all the usual I* blessings: http://www.isi.edu/otdr/
Maintaining a single, authoritative root seems, IMHO, to be a Good Thing. Given multiple registries, namespace collisions would get ugly -- and, even in the absence of collisions, let us consider "reachability" issues.
That's the point. Getting the alt.root "universes" to cooperate is an exercise similar to "cat herding", but it has to start somewhere. Best Regards, Simon -- DNS is not a sacred cow that cannot be replaced by something better.