Must be irritating for a foreign entity to be forced to pay a US tax for an international resource. Wasn't there something like this that created an uproar in Boston Harbor?

This brings up something which has essentially been talked about around our office a couple times. What is to stop all of the foreign-placed root-servers from telling the US Government to go take some salt and pound it hard because they're not going to listen to NSI's servers any longer? I mean, there are a lot of foreign entities (and domestic ones too, but let's leave that aside for the moment) who are unhappy with the way the US Government is handling the domain registration process. What is to stop people in other countries saying "Oh, by the way, our root server doesn't listen to NSI any more, we get our updates from 'here'", creating an almost civil-war attitude between root servers. What I'm thinking of is something similiar to the whole AlterNIC concept, but with a little better organization, with "real" root-servers joining up and telling the US Government to pound salt. I think that the majority of internet operators would probably side with the foreign (perhaps independent would be a better word) root-server operators simply because the majority of us are unhappy with NSI's position on a number of things. Heck, I suspect that you could even convince the BIND guys to distribute a "current independent" root-server list with the BIND distribution as a default for future versions. The Feds may CLAIM an "exclusive right" to the COM/EDU/NET/ORG heirarchies, but what legal status does that claim hold outside of the confines of the US? What other country REALLY has to listen to them? Not looking to start a politcal war here, but I'm just curious as to WHY this hasn't happened, and/or what could cause it to happen in the future? D

It appears that the government has received permission to raise the domain fees back to $50. ... Must be irritating for a foreign entity to be forced to pay a US tax for an international resource. Wasn't there something like this that created an uproar in Boston Harbor?

Well here is a happy foreign entity. I have even more reason now to point customers at our national registry which has working whois, working automatable registration, working redelegation, working (almost) billing etc. etc.... (with hat as per .sig) -- Alex Bligh GX Networks (formerly Xara Networks)