But seriously are there any volunteers there to run root name servers in Europe and Asia or are people now expecting to get paid to it through ICANN contract.
last time i was offically detailed to care about such things the volunteer list was over 100. (circa 1998). can't say who would want to get paid for it.
We do need root name server for every continent and perhaps something like "official mirror" should be considered where somebody would run nameserver with complete mirror of all zones that root name server would have but it would not be considered "official root" name server (but ISPs in its region would know about and us it). Are other regions ever considered something like this to ease load on current root servers or perhaps as a first step to having root server there?
why on every continent? this way lies madness. look to topology. and your mirroring proposal (see otha-sans internet-draft) has some serious flaws wrt data integrity that really need to be addressed first. that code is slowly coming.
patience grasshopper. :) pushing "J" to a distinctly different broadcast domain is the first step to pushing that instance elsewhere. pre-ICANN, things moved fairly quickly as compared to post-ICANN.
--bill