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This story is so full of inconsistencies and ignorance that one hardly knows where to begin.

In one place they tell us Brazil relies on the Internet for its taxes and therefore US must give up control. In another they point out that China filters what their Internet users can access. Wouldn't that imply China already has control?

The US "Controls" the net by hosting the root level domain servers, but these servers are not essential for local use of the Internet. Every ISP and their up-stream provider hosts copies of these domain server. The root level servers could go down for a week and not many people would notice. Joe user never uses these servers.

All these servers to is convert www.freerepublic.com to 209.157.64.200. Thats it. Nothing more.

And your local ISP does this for you unless their server has never heard of freerepublic.com because they don't keep it up to date. In which case it asks its upstream provider, and so on up the chain to the root servers. Joe user never gets to use the root servers directly.

Once your machine is told the IP of Freerepublic it contacts it directly to get a web page without going through any US government facilities.

Some countries host their own top level servers for in-country use. China, for example. Brazil could do the same and thereby assure its tax system would never fail.

Other than that, there is no infrastructure that is in the hands of the US government that is not also replicated elsewhere.

There is no filtering that can be carried out by the US government to prevent a tax payer in Buenos Aries from contacting the tax headquarters in Brasilia, because that transaction never leaves Brazil.

And China can prevent their citizens from ever seeing www.whitehouse.com if that is what they fear, by simply null-routing that domain in their top level domain servers or blocking that particular IP.

What are these fools going on about?

And also the main root servers are mirrored: http://european.nl.orsn.net/

The article is pure over-reaction to an otherwise irrelevvant issue

I uestion your claim to the degree that as TLDs go dowhn and stay down for a while, even if they are brought back up after a while, a large number of DNS directories, would find that
most of the sites registartions would have expired. and the more that go down, the biger and longer it takes to rebuild their DNS directories with valid IP's, causing an ever greater overload on the remaining TLDs. Till they eventaully become logjammed. While entering a an IP # may still take you to the site/page, the connection will be slower, as signal will basically have to hunt for the website,
rather than be able use intelligent routing. *also* increasing overhead.
to

" What are these fools going on about?"

They don't know. They don't know anything about controlling the Internet.

But they do know they want to control the Internet.