Oct 09
12
Top Five Reasons for Owning Your Own Root Server
N.B.: It has been strongly suggested to me that many of the conclusions drawn by the following article are incorrect.
Specifically http://blog.icann.org/2007/11/there-are-not-13-root-servers/
My knowledge of these subjrcts is somewhat aged and possibly incorrect.
Readers should draw their own conclusions.
I would add:
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/internet/printfriendly.htm?AT=61964200-39001260c
The key to the U.S. government's influence is a master list of top-level
domains that the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers distributes to root servers, which guide traffic to
each one of those top-level domains. The U.S. Commerce Department has
final approval of the list.
<https://www.isc.org/node/491>
Response to “L” Root Server Scaling Report released by ICANN 17 September 2009
And:
http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/pipermail/at-large_atlarge-lists.icann.org/2009q1/005335.html
“There is an agreement now between ICANN and ISC for the F root server.
But is is very much a contract that says “don't tread on me” rather than one that defines obligatory service levels and imposes constraints
against using the advantages of the root server position for discriminatory actions or as a vehicle to make piles of money.”
Original Article:
This is a very simplified non-technical list.
1. get to see what everyone is really
interested in and don’t have to depend on fake numbers from data collection
agents paid for by large media interests like compete.com
2. can intercept/interdict any traffic
that you don’t’ want.
3. including eliminating spam and
4. reducing Phishing and Malware sites.
(Requires active effort)/ prevent organisations from redirecting or hijacking
your traffic (By being locally accessible
to ISP’s and thereby being more responsive under CERT notifications and
attack conditions.)
5. reduce dramatically the amount of DNS
bandwidth being used on the network which can be calculated approximately as
being 5MB per annum each of per user/per Internet site. (@3,000,000,000 users
and 109.5 billion web sites (see References) that equals 562,500,000,000 GB of
annual DNS traffic which at a cost of 1.8 cents per gigabyte equals
$10,125,000,000 of traffic value. To Australia
that equals an estimated cost of $
24,107,143 per annum.
For Australia
to be truly competitive in a world of online e-commerce – a local root-server
is not a negotiable item, it is an imperitive.
Existing Root Servers.
Source: www.itu.int/itudoc/itu-t/com2/infodocs/023_ww9.doc
As can be seen from the above drawing, six of the root
servers are within a few kilometers of each other. A,J,H,G,C,D with two being
in the same rack. I’ve heard of redundancy, but I think that’s just a little
over the top.
Regardless, a Root server in every continent levels the
global internet playing field.
It would appear that the regions most inconvenienced are the
Middle-east through Asia, Asia minor
and Oceania.
I can see no valid reason for all traffic to always go via
the US or the
Docklands in the UK,
Sweden or Japan.
This may be great for the AT&T’s of the world – but it’s
really bad for all consumers that don’t reside in the USA
the UK, Europe
or Japan and it
makes the rest of the internet reliant on a US
concentric Internet.
India
has one billion people who are rapidly connecting to the Net.
China
has 1.3 billion rapidly connecting to the net.
The balance of Asia and Oceania
has another 1.1 billion.
That’s 50% of the world reliant on the “M” server,
whilst the USA
with only 5% of the worlds population get 10 servers for the country.
This means that the least developed regions of the world pay
the most for their directory lookups.
As Don Bradman would have said – It's just not cricket.
If Australia
is the third major trading partner of the USA,
(as far as balance of payment in favour to the US
is concerned) then it should be treated accordingly.
References:
www.itu.int/itudoc/itu-t/com2/infodocs/023_ww9.doc
Statistics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
According to a 2001 study, there were massively more than
550 billion documents on the Web, mostly in the invisible Web, or deep Web.[56]
A 2002 survey of 2,024 million Web pages[57]
determined that by far the most Web content was in English: 56.4%; next were
pages in German (7.7%), French (5.6%), and Japanese (4.9%). A more recent
study, which used Web searches in 75 different languages to sample the Web,
determined that there were over 11.5 billion Web pages in the publicly
indexable Web as of the end of January 2005.[58]
As of March 2009, the indexable web contains at least
25.21 billion pages.[59]
On July 25, 2008, Google
software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj announced that Google
Search had discovered one trillion unique URLs.[60]
As of May 2009, over 109.5 million websites operated.[61]
Of these 74% were commercial or other sites operating in the .com generic top-level domain.[61]