>> Anybody who wants to can set up their own name servers, and they don't
>> have to ever connect to the current root name servers. But few people
>> are inclined to do this. Ninety-nine percent of users will simply
>> configure their systems to use their ISP's name servers by virtue of
>> doing nothing: DHCP, the same protocol by which they receive their IP
>> address assignment, will also tell them the IP address(es) to use for
>> domain name lookups. Ninety-nine percent of ISPs will use the root
>> name server hints which were packaged with their own name server setup
>> packages, and guess where those hints will send domain name requests
>> for the root zone?
> Actually it's DNS that tells them. DHCP does nothing more than dish out
> an IP address and various routing information.
George was correct. One of the items DHCP can pass is DNS server addresses. You can configure your system not to use them, but most users don't know how. Nor do they have much reason to do so. I have thought about running a caching only server myself, but problems with my ISP's servers have tended to go away before I worked up the energy.