[LINK] Top five reasons for Australia to Get a Root-Server.

[Glen Turner]

Tom,

You missed the main reason, which is for typographic errors
to be determined rapidly.

> 1.	get to see what everyone is really interested in and don't have
> to depend on fake numbers from data collection agents paid for by large
> media interests like compete.com

No. The answers provided by the root DNS servers are cached. So traffic
to DNS root is not at all reflective of Internet traffic in total. This
is best illustrated by the high proportion of traffic to root which is
typos.

> 2.	can intercept/interdict any traffic that you don't' want.

No. Again, this is defeated by the caching.

> 3.	including eliminating spam and

No. Because you can't tell if a request from a ISP's DNS forwarder will
be used for spamming or not.

> 4.	reducing Phishing and Malware sites. (Requires active effort)/
> prevent organisations from redirecting or hijacking your traffic (By
> being locally accessible  to ISP's and thereby being more responsive
> under CERT notifications and attack conditions.)

The entire .com, .net, .au etc are not malware. You need the next level
of servers down to implement this policy.

> 5.	reduce dramatically the amount of DNS bandwidth being used on
> the network which can be calculated approximately as being 5MB per annum
> each of per user/per Internet site. (@3,000,000,000 users and 109.5
> billion web sites (see References) that equals 562,500,000,000 GB of
> annual DNS traffic which at a cost of 1.8 cents per gigabyte equals
> $10,125,000,000 of traffic value. To Australia that equals an estimated
> cost of  $ 24,107,143 per annum.

This was once a major concern to us ISPs, together with the consequences
of a complete link failure.  Australian ISPs have long used DNS
forwarders, and these caches reduce the bandwidth considerably (and,
more importantly, reduce the latency of DNS lookup, since the speed of
DNS lookup is often the major proportion of response time). Anycast
servers have solved the second issue.

> For Australia to be truly competitive in a world of online e-commerce -
> a local root-server is not a negotiable item, it is an imperitive.

No.

In short, this is an issue which rather occupied our minds during the
1990s, but which we've worked around, and so is now mainly irrelevant.

-- 
 Glen Turner
 www.gdt.id.au/~gdt