Root Name Server, Root Name Server Instance, ICANN, IANA, USA and Internet in Detail

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 Root Server:

When we type in ​‘abc.com’ in your browser, it sends a request to the computer’s resolver asking for the IP address of the website you’re looking for. The resolver in turn sends this ​‘DNS query’ to their Internet Service Provider (ISP) or local DNS server, which in turn asks a root server to find out the authoritative servers. The root server provides a list of authoritative servers for .com first, which in turn provides a list of authoritative servers for ​‘abc.com’. The DNS server then asks the ​‘abc.com’ server for the IP address where the website content is stored and relays it back to your browser via your computer’s resolver and that is how you get to see the website where you can find this paper.

Twelve organizations, known as the “root server operators”, administer 13 “identities”, each of which is named with the letters 'a' to 'm' within the “root-server.net” domain, i.e., “a.rootservers.net” through “m.root-servers.net”. Each of these root server identities, known as root services, has two unique IP addresses associated with it, an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address. These IP addresses are pre-configured in all resolvers on the Internet and allow those resolvers to find the root services to ask questions. And the root services receive a lot of these questions: over 70 billion per day. The 13 root services respond to the queries they receive either with information found in the root zone as it is managed by the IANA Functions operated by ICANN or, in the case that the TLD being queried has not been delegated, a message that indicates the name does not exist. This information is protected by DNSSEC: any modification of the data by anyone will cause resolvers that have DNSSEC enabled to ignore the response, thereby preventing modification of the root zone or attacks that try to insert unauthentic information into a response.

Root Server Instance:

The root server operators operate root server instances around the world using a routing technique called anycast.  Anycast routing allows machines all over the Internet to use the same IP addresses to provide identical responses, thereby allowing root server instances to be located in hundreds of different cities and countries.

Root Server vs Root Server Instance:

There is no functional difference between Root Server and Root Server Instance. But both the root server and root server instance are under the control of root server operator.

And so while there is no root server in India at present, there are already nine instances present here. There are three J‑root instances — one in Delhi, one in Mumbai and one in Gorakhpur. There are two L‑root instances, one in Mumbai and one in Kolkata. The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) has sponsored three root server instances, one I‑root in Mumbai, one K‑root at Delhi and an F‑Root in Chennai, and further, there is also a D‑root instance in Mumbai.

One which was recently installed in Rajasthan is Root Server Instance Only. It is not a Root Server. 

It is to be noted here that eventhough ICANN installed Root Name Server Instance in Rajasthan, ICANN did not give administrative access either to Government of Rajasthan or to the Government of India. Here the responsibility of hosting party is to give supporting infrastructure ( Like electricity backup, transport connectivity, high speed internet connection etc., ) to Root Name Server Instance Instruments. Not only ICANN, none of the Root Server Operator will give administrative access to hosting party ( Refer Question Number 15 in the page https://www.dns.icann.org/imrs/faq/ )

Why Only 13 Root servers?

At the time the DNS was designed, the IP address in use was IPv4, which contains 32 bits. For efficient networking and better performance, these IP addresses should fit into a single packet (using UDP, the DNS's default protocol). Using IPv4, the DNS data that can fit into a single packet is limited to 512 bytes. As each IPv4 address requires 32 bytes, having 13 servers uses 416 bytes, leaving up to 96 bytes for the remaining protocol information.

States of IPv6:

Deployment of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), the latest generation of the Internet Protocol, has been in progress since the mid-2000s.

IPv6 was designed as a replacement for IPv4. IPv4 has been in use since 1982, and is in the final stages of exhausting its unallocated address space, but still carries most Internet traffic. Google's statistics show IPv6 availability of its users at around 32–37% depending on the day of the week (greater on weekends), as of November 2021.[2] Adoption is uneven across countries and Internet service providers. Many countries have 0% use while a few have over 50% use, such as India and Germany. In November 2016, 1,491 (98.2%) of the 1,519 top-level domains (TLDs) in the Internet supported IPv6 to access their domain name servers, and 1,485 (97.8%) zones contained IPv6 glue records, and approximately 9.0 million domains (4.6%) had IPv6 address records in their zones. Of all networks in the global BGP routing table, 29.2% had IPv6 protocol support.

By 2011, all major operating systems in use on personal computers and server systems had production-quality IPv6 implementations. Cellular telephone systems present a large deployment field for Internet Protocol devices as mobile telephone service continues to make the transition from 3G to 4G technologies, in which voice is provisioned as a voice over IP (VoIP) service. In 2009, the US cellular operator Verizon released technical specifications for devices to operate on its 4G networks. The specification mandates IPv6 operation according to the 3GPP Release 8 Specifications (March 2009), and deprecates IPv4 as an optional capability.

ICANN, IANA, Root Server Operators and USA:

ICANN was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit partnership of people from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers.

ICANN doesn’t control content on the Internet. It cannot stop spam and it doesn’t deal with access to the Internet. But through its coordination role of the Internet’s naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the Internet.

As mentioned earlier, ICANN’s role is to oversee the huge and complex interconnected network of unique identifiers that allow computers on the Internet to find one another.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Internet Protocol-related symbols and Internet numbers.

Currently it is a function of ICANN, a nonprofit private American corporation established in 1998 primarily for this purpose under a United States Department of Commerce contract. ICANN managed IANA directly from 1998 through 2016, when it was transferred to Public Technical Identifiers (PTI), an affiliate of ICANN that operates IANA today. Before it, IANA was administered principally by Jon Postel at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California (USC) situated at Marina Del Rey (Los Angeles), under a contract USC/ISI had with the United States Department of Defense.

All the operators of Root Servers are registered entities in USA. ICANN is itself an organisation incorporated under the law of the State of California in the United States. That means ICANN must abide by the laws of the United States and can be called to account by the judicial system i.e. ICANN can be taken to court.

So USA can still exert administrative and policy control over root server operators and ICANN and in turn IANA.

With Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding the National Security Agency’s (NSA) expansive surveillance practice, there came a global loss of trust in the US government’s stewardship of the Internet, which led to increasing pressure to shift from US oversight to a more international system.

Options for India:

1.      Moving existing server to India: Current operators are and in particular USA may not accept this proposal.

2.      Second Option will be to create 14th root server: It is impossible without IPv6 being universally accepted and implemented. Even if it is accepted, it is impossible to predict what direction Indian demands ( related to dedicated root server ) will take in international Politics.

 

https://internetdemocracy.in/reports/india-at-the-internets-root-kovacs-handa-2016#roots-and-mirrors

https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/octo-010-06may20-en.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Assigned_Numbers_Authority

https://help.apnic.net/s/article/Root-servers

https://www.dns.icann.org/imrs/faq/

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