The root name servers each take between 500 and 1000 queries per second. So testing them from time to time isn't going to hurt much. However, we don't need to test them from very many places, since we would just overload the trouble reporting system, which tends to be biologically limited. How about if each root name server just implements RFC 2010 and does their own monitoring, and InterNIC does the fallback monitoring, and we stop arguing about global issues on a north american mailing list?