(Hopefully someone will correct me if any of this is wrong. But it would be nice if the thread ends.) Here's how it works, politically. IANA is the ultimate custodian of the namespace. IANA has delegated administrative control of the six traditional top-level domains (TLDs) to the InterNIC. The InterNIC is a building in my zipcode. It's in a mundane industrial park they share with PSI. It is operated by NSI, which is owned by SAIC, and funded by an NSF grant and the new domain charges. Here's how it works, technically. Your nameserver, if it doesn't know how to jump into the middle of the tree (via cached data, or the preconfigured servers for the local domain and the root), will start at the top of the tree and walk down. The root nameservers are run by volunteers. There are nine. One is at the InterNIC, but it need not be. The others are at ISI, PSI, UMD, NASA, UUNET (ISC), DDN, the Army Research Lab, and NORDUnet (in Sweden). (The most central point is actually Paul Vixie, maintainer of BIND, the software used for almost all nameservers, including the roots. UUNET funds BIND development.) If the InterNIC yanked your domain, this would *not* affect your IP connectivity -- your ability to be reached by any Internet protocol via IP address. The InterNIC has nothing at all to do with that. I'm much more worried about a lack of competency at NSI than I am about the FBI asking them to pull the plug on troublemakers, especially since it would be taken very seriously if you had a legitimate complaint about unjust termination (and some people, upset at having to pay for their domain(s), are looking for any reason to tear into the InterNIC's reputation). And *especially* since the evil government types could just call up Bell Atlantic, who they are already friendly with, and have them make my line unusable. That's what I'd do, were I an evil government type. And if anyone wanted to subvert your domain at a small fraction of the sites, DNS is easily spoofable.... So keep a sense of perspective. -- Shields.