Re: who runs the root, Cogent-TATA peering dispute?

["John R. Levine" <johnl () iecc com>]

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.

I'm not guessing here, I go to ICANN meetings and talk to these people.

R's,
John