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DNS Structure: Alternate Roots

Among the most controversial issues in the ongoing saga of the expansion of the domain name space is the issue of "alternate roots." Here is some information on this concept:.

What is the 'Root'?

Since the domain name space is hierarchical in nature, there has to be something at the top of the pyramid, and that is what is called the "root". This is a "top-level server" that is defined as the ultimate authority on what domains actually exist and where their locations can be found. Actually, for redundancy sake, there are several root servers (with hostnames within the domain root-servers.net), but they are kept in sync. A new top-level domain doesn't really exist on the Internet until it is added to the root servers, so that any system anywhere on the net that is seeking that domain can find out from the root where the specific DNS servers for that domain lie. (Or, to be more precise, it finds out from the root where the DNS servers for the top level domain it's seeking lie, and then finds out from those servers where the DNS servers for the second level domain are, and so on. Thus, to look up host.subsite.example.com, a DNS query would go first to the root servers, then the .com server, then the server for example.com, and finally the subdomain DNS server for subsite.example.com, which can finally report on what the IP address of the hostname host is.) In practice, not all DNS queries need to go to one of the root servers (those servers would be overloaded if they did), because of caches at many different levels in the system allowing queries to be resolved at other levels, but top-level change does ultimately propagate from the root.

Thus, the operators of the root servers have a great deal of political power over the domain name system. Presently, these servers are operated by Verisign, but their policies are determined by ICANN, the organization set up to administer Internet naming and numbering schemes. Since ICANN has attracted a great deal of criticism for its biases towards large impersonal bureaucracies and against individual Internet users, various people have come up with the idea of "fighting back" against ICANN by setting up alternate roots.

What is an 'Alternate Root'?

Setting up an alternate root turns out to be a very simple matter. The Internet has always been sort of a "do-it-yourself" thing, not centrally controlled or administered like a proprietary online service. You can actually make your own computer recognize any weird domain names you want, whether they officially exist or not. For instance, if you're running Windows 98, you can open up a file named "HOSTS" in your Windows directory using any text editor and edit it to insert entries for domains of your choice -- show.biz, for instance -- and make them go to any place on the net for which you know the IP address (a series of numbers that's the actual address of anything on the net -- domain names are just a human-understandable front-end to them). Of course, if you do that, the new domains you created in this manner work only on your own computer, not for anybody else. If you administer an office LAN, you can set up phony domains there which work for anyone in the office. If you're the system administrator for an ISP, you can set up domains that any of your customers can reach. But they still won't work anywhere else in the world, for people not connecting through your ISP, as long as the standard roots don't recognize them. And, if there's a real site at the address you're using, and it's at a different location than the place you've redefined your host table to point, then you can't access it; the rest of the world will see a different show.biz than you do.

What the "alternate roots" have done is set up servers that recognize a bunch of new top level domains as well as the "standard" ones like .com. That part is easy. The hard part is getting people to use those servers instead of the normal roots. Actually, it's the ISP administrators that need convincing to switch roots, since most normal users connect to their ISP's servers for DNS resolution, so if those servers in turn use an alternate root, then the users would have access to any new domains that are on that alternate root (but wouldn't have access to any that are on the normal root but not the alternate one).

Who would do such a thing?

Several alternate roots exist, some created as a technical experiment, some as a political protest, and others in an attempt to make money by selling registrations in alternate TLDs. (Perhaps some of these root servers were created out of a mixture of all three of these motives.) However, none of them have any official status with the governing bodies of the Internet. That doesn't automatically stop them from operating, however, since any official status that anybody has on the Internet is the result of informal consensus rather than force -- nobody holds a gun to anybody to tell them which root servers to use, but the "standard" ones are the "de facto" roots because they're in traditional use and are the defaults built into server software (so the administrator has to make an explicit decision to use a different root if he so desires).