Re: Commercial Advantages of Hosting Name Servers

[Bill Manning]

% If a name server is hosted with an ISP, does that give the ISP a commercial
% advantage in anyway, for example, in marketing, or in negotiating peering
% agreements, or similar?

        Yes, hosting a server does provide a commercial advantage. There
        is no way to escape it.

        This concern was what drove the placement of the four additional
        root servers that were created in 1995.  Many ISPs expressed 
        interest in hosting. The principle reason was that it provided
        a competative advantage, hence the model that was chosen was to
        have one entity, usually a membership or constituency based 
        entity operate the node, with physical placement being directed
        by short RTTs within a region and good connectivity to the 
        other servers for the domain.

        
--bill