By-the-way, I believe that it is still the case that the US Dep't of Commerce Agency, the NTIA, has a veto power over ICANN with regard to TLDs. This authority, assuming it still exists, is a binary power to affect the presence or absence of a TLD. But it could be used as a lever to affect policies and TLD behavior. Is it still the case that ICANN merely recommends TLDs to NTIA? And does NTIA still issue instructions to Verisign regarding what edits to make to a root zone file? I am not sure how that has changed with DNSSEC signed records. Unless things have changed NTIA has the power to refuse to put any TLD authorized by ICANN into the root zone file currently used by root servers; and NTIA also has the power to insert any TLD that it would like into that root zone file. In other words the US seems to have, to some extent, what the other countries and ITU want. --karl--