Danger. I'm still ranting. Don't read this.  Someone asked in private e-mail...

What's to keep someone from adding some of those "bogus" root servers into a cache file? What harm would it do? There seems to be something I'm missing? If I had users that wanted access to .web, couldn't I add those into the cache?

which .web do you mean? the one iahc is creating, the one amblin tried to create, or one of the dozen that will be created next week if piracy proves to be a useful way to add top level domain names? (did the ISP explosion teach you guys NOTHING about copycatting?) and when one of your customers wants foo.web and the other wants bar.web and you can't satisfy both because they're in different .web's? and when one of your customers wants foo.web and the other wants foo.web except they are different web sites depending on which root servers you point at? ultimately the answer is: there is one "." and anybody who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something that you do NOT want to pay for. (keep your hand on your wallet.) hell, i may create a .web zone of my own if the money is THAT easy to get. in fact, let's ALL create .web and then let's create usenet:alt.gtlds.web and use it to synchronize entries therein. that way when someone creates foo.web (in exchange for a service fee from the FOO company), everyone else who has a .web domain can add the same delegation (even though they did NOT get a service fee from the FOO company) and there will be no conflicts. what's that you say? impractical? well if it won't work for .web, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK IT WILL WORK FOR "." ??? the issues are clear cut. pirates are loose on the seas you're surfing, and most of them want your money. some of them want power. a few of them just want some personal recognition -- it hurts their feelings that they weren't consulted on whether there should or shouldn't have been an IAHC. none of these pirates give a rat's a** whether your customers all get the same FOO when they ask for FOO.WEB. in fact at least one of them thinks this would be a feature since each FOO _deserves_ a chance to be FOO.WEB. makes one long for the days of HOSTS.TXT. which was at least reliable and coherent. maybe it'll make a comeback in the form of everybody-run-their-own "." server. i guess i've said this about 900 times now. DNS is a coherent, distributed database. don't do anything that will make it less coherent. don't lets start back in on things that will make the same name mean something different (or become meaningless) depending on where you're standing when you resolve it.