The root servers are anycasted. Each one of those root server IPs corresponds to N physical servers at diverse networks / locations all over the world.

> I'm just a 'little guy' in the food chain so I always figured that doing something like that was for the ISP level folks

A lot of people are running recursive resolvers at home (like pi-hole stuff, or most people running some custom openwrt router/modem). I'm running one on my laptop (my resolver is localhost) and it works great.

> After taking a quick skim of it the list seems to be extremely 'Western-Centric'

It is, but that's what the internet is. But by running your own recursive resolver you can control your cache and a lot of the data doesn't change often. If you're extra paranoid you can cache the record data (or even archive the history) for ccTLD (or even all TLDs). For stuff (domains) you're interested in you can also hard-code or otherwise program "non-standard" ways to resolve the ips (by somehow populating a local database that overrides recursive resolution), like pi-hole/safebrowsing blocklists, stuff from institutions or CDNs you trust.

They are western centric, and unfortunately, in this current state of the web they're still essentially the authority on DNS.

Alternatively, you can maintain the NSes for all the TLDs you are particularly interested in, and alert yourself if they change to something you don't recognize.

Finally, keep in mind that whatever you do, you need to have multiple vantage points to the internet. There's not a lot stopping your ISP from not delivering you to the right host when you try to talk to it. E.g. your ISP can fake the DNS responses.

> They are western centric, and unfortunately, in this current state of the web they're still essentially the authority on DNS.

I‘m curious to see your evidence on that or which future state you would see as a more fortunate one.

Questioning why the distributed cluster runs on nodes 'a' and 'b' alone doesn't necessarily imply that nodes 'c', 'd' and 'e' are any better or worse, today or in future.

If I knew the answer to this I would be very rich and probably have my name on multiple textbooks of solving decentralized computing problems.

The canonical DNS system itself is extremely Western-Centric.

As are many Western inventions

DNS[0] is only a decentralized hierarchy with caching, a class of system which pre-dates the digital era as the de-facto means of political and military organization in any human society larger than a village or town. DNS as a directory system for IP is could itself be viewed as a direct philosophical descendant of military insignia (perhaps via the then-popular branch-tangent of the telephone book, itself ex-telegraph, and postal system) and these could all be in effect traced back to at least Roman society[1], I don't think arguing this is a "western" invention is very convincing or useful. Any ancient army or polity of any size would have had an equivalent, which would then include ancient Egypt, China[2], India, Mesopotamia[3], Mesoamerica, etc. Actually, come to think of it, the comparative study of ancient postal systems would be pretty interesting.[4]

[0] Original DNS RFC1035 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035 (1987) [1] Somewhat cheekily as the inventor of DNS has a Greek surname. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Mockapetris [2] 2000+ years ago and mature enough to have QoS+max-TTL/hop: http://libgen.rs/scimag/10.1163%2F9789004292123 (pp17-48) + where I write this. [3] Evidenced to 9th century BC https://www.ucl.ac.uk/sargon/essentials/governors/thekingsro... [4] Start by fixing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_postal_history

> I don't think arguing this is a "western" invention is very convincing or useful. Any ancient army or polity of any size would have had an equivalent, which would then include ancient Egypt, China[2], India, Mesopotamia[3], Mesoamerica, etc.

And yet, none of these other regions and cultures actually did invent it, and thus it remains a Western invention.

Of course. However, my point was the originality and claim to authorship is low, because if you look at store and forward networks with centrally agreed node identification and local caching using that for routing purposes, humans have literally done it globally for 3000+ years... that's clear prior art.

It's like "technology" being used to describe a bash script, or "invention" used to describe a standard algorithm.

By that same token the internet was invented by the first person to hand gesture to another one. You can’t dilute DNS down to a directory because there were/and are already other directory protocols.

Walking gets you from A to B just like a car, so actually the first bipeds really invented the automobile.

It's more like describing a walking robot as an original invention, which it is, but all they really did was ape apes.

You've been nerdsniped my friend! bazinga