> On May 18, 2024, at 03:53, John R. Levine <jo...@iecc.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 17 May 2024, William Herrin wrote:
>> That said, ICANN generates the root zone including the servers
>> declared authoritative for the zone.
> Nope.
>
>> So they do have an ability to
>> say: nope, you've crossed the line to any of the root operators.
> Very very nope.
>
> ICANN as the IANA Functions Operator maintains the database of TLD info. They
> provide this to Verisign, the Root Zone Maintainer, who create the root zone
> and distribute it to the root server operators. Verisign does this under a
> contract with NTIA, one of the few bits of the Internet that is still under a
> US government contract:
>
> https://www.ntia.gov/page/verisign-cooperative-agreement
>
> Should ICANN attempt to mess with the distribution of the root zone, let us
> just say that the results would not be pretty. There's a balance of terror
> here. ICANN carefully never does anything that would make the root server
> operators say no, and the root server operators carefully avoid putting ICANN
> in a position where they might have to do that.
John is exactly correct on each of these points. And I guess I’d go a little
further and say that ICANN and IANA are separate entities, with IANA predating
ICANN by a decade.
-Bill
