Hi Sam, There are 13 Root Servers serving the entire TLD structure of the Internet (both ccTLDs and gTLDs), and also these root servers also resolve the top level of IP Adressing, and some other databases. The 13 Root Servers are numbered A through to M, and mostly are based in the USA. There are hundreds of instances of mirrors of these root servers, including a couple in NZ. The IANA function is contracted by the US Government, since 1999 the contract has been with ICANN, and there is a 3 way agreement and process between US Government, ICANN and Verisign, to publish the IANA database on the A Root Server. The other 12 Root Servers pick up the database / zone file from the A Root. To date, to my knowledge, the Root Server Operators have not failed to replicate the IANA database. Furthermore, to date, the US Government could be seen to be the "careful custodian" of the IANA database, with their checking of ICANNs updates to the database confined to ensuring the changes do not threaten the stability of the Internet - and generally free from any political or US-centric legal interference. Cheers Keith On 1/04/2012 8:41 a.m., Sam Russell wrote:
The article said there are only 13 root servers so I'm not sure that the article was sure what it's talking about.
The controversy at the moment seems to be the extradition of the 23-year-old admin of tvshack.net to the USA. The server wasn't hosted in the USA, but having a .net domain meant that he could be tried under US law. As a generic top level domain (gTLD), a .net domain shouldn't be bound by the whims of any one country, but only by ICANN/IANA.
The problem is that the gTLDs are all hosted in the USA, and judges are interpreting this to mean that websites with gTLDs are bound by US law. This is the same as if the printing of our phone books was outsourced to China, and then China extraditing the Tibetian embassy because their phone number is in a Chinese-printed phone book.
tl;dr 60+ year old judges don't know how the Internet works, and this is just the next part of the slippery slope that geo-IP boundaries have put us on
Sent from my iPhone
On Apr 1, 2012, at 6:28 AM, Joe Abley
wrote: On 2012-03-31, at 06:00, Sam Russell wrote:
I enjoyed the article, but it really made me wonder whether this would be happening if the gTLD servers weren't under US jurisdiction
What are "the gTLD servers", and why do you think they are related to the threat that article was talking about?
Joe
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