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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

Out of interest I looked up who controls the DNS root servers:

Europe (2): RIPE and Netnod AB. RIPE is Europe’s RIR, run as a conference by European ISPs. Netnod is a Swedish ISP.

Asia (1): Project WIDE, part of the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

US (9): Verisign, Cogent, NASA, US Department of Defense, US Army, the University of Maryland, ISC (as in the Bind9 people), ICANN itself, and the University of Southern California.

The last two seem to have some overlap and there is probably a lot of overlap between all of these organisations.

Verisign runs two root servers which is why the list has twelve entries but the root servers run from A to M.

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DNS != The internet. You can still use the internet without access to the DNS root servers

You could also run the internet on smoke signals but nobody does it

If you think losing DNS root servers means that NK would have to use smoke signals then I think you don't understand how the internet works frankly. If you blocked your own computers access to the DNS root servers right now you probably wouldn't even notice the difference

smoke signals is a non-standard extension. however over avian carrier has its own rfc and is entirely legit:

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549.html

+1, One cab likely also presume that especially DNS at the root level is already handled locally for NK. They reportedly have their own intranet so presumably they also have common services like DNS hosted their.

just edit /etc/hosts or run your own bind, and point dns to 127.0.0.1, no DNS root server needed!

Of course but the contention is that Internet infrastructure, of which DNS is a fairly indicative example, is controlled by US entities.

It’s not, but it mostly is, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of other centralised components — hardware, cables, numbering, protocols — were similarly organized.

It would be very easy to run without DNS. Just have someone bring a decent sized chunk of the world's DNS entries into the country in a diplomatic pouch every month.

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