It appears that Bryan Fields <nanog@nanog.org> said: >Suppose the community wanted to change this or make a formal policy on root >server hosting requirements. Where would this be done? Could a party submit >a proposal to ICANN via the policy development process? If not where should >the community start this?
The Governance Working Group that David mentioned has been grinding along for the better part of a decade. It's quite a difficult problem. The existing roots are doing a decent job, and any more formal arrangement runs the risk of politically motivated "improvements". People are worried about what happens if a root goes rogue or disappears but unless the rogue operator were Verisign, which is utterly implausible, the result would be not much. These days a lot of web caches have their own copies of the root that they get directly from ICANN or Verisign. (See RFC 8806. It's really easy.) For everyone else, most clients now make DNSSEC queries and the root's signatures expire after two weeks. I would be a lot more worried about the other scenario David hinted at, a future iteration of the US government tells ICANN or Verisign to do something to the root zone, e.g., delete Iran or Russia or point their name servers at something else. https://community.icann.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=120820189 R's, John
