----- Original Message -----

From: "David Conrad" <drc@virtualized.org>

On Feb 13, 2011, at 7:56 AM, Joel Jaeggli wrote:

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Of course, one might ask why those well known anycast addresses are "owned" by 12 different organizations instead of being "golden" addresses specified in an RFC or somesuch, but that gets into root server operator politics...

there are perfectly valid reasons why you might want to renumber one,

Ignoring historical mistakes, what would they be?

...

the current institutional heterogeneity has pretty good prospects for survivability.

"Golden" addresses dedicated to root service (as opposed to 'owned' by the root serving organization) means nothing regarding who is operating servers behind those addresses. It does make it easier to change who performs root service operation (hence the politics).

Exactly: it *centralizes control* over what the roots are. The second- and third-order resultants of that observation will be left as an exercise for the student; politics are off-topic for NANOG :-) Cheers, -- jra