It's easy to get a feed of the root zone. Fill out a form from
> Verisign, fax it back, and you too can FTP a copy from their server
> whenever you want. BTDTGTZF
> If you wanted to run your own root with a copy of the same data, you
> could. But there's no point, since the real roots work just fine.
I was thinking of a zone transfer, but your method is probably more than good enough, so I stand corrected.
I don't think much of anybody other than a national government would want to do this. The reasons for that would be partly to make sure the US couldn't mess up their Internet operations, and partly a matter of not having to petition another sovereign power for changes they want to make.
Of course, the dispute goes beyond control of DNS to allocation of IPV4 address space and other issues.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But although the 'real roots' work just
> fine, as you note, someone starting their own competing root server
> could bypass all the silly requirements of things like ICANN couldn't
> he? In addition to copying all the data now in use, he could also start
> his own domains, could he not? He could start a domain for example
> called '.abracadabra' or whatever name and it would not be subject to
> any rules but his own. Or am I missing something here?
Only that his root domains would only be recognized by users of his root servers. There might be some use for this in setting up shorthand domain names, but it wouldn't make the actual sites private, since they would still have public underlying IP addresses.