Root name server

Think about this.

Those root servers, who's paying for those servers? What's the economic incentive?

Silicon Valley pretty much screws the peons and rewards the VCs.

The only difference is...

Each time you ask a server that's responsible for a particular set of names, it can tell you about one level down in that name.

So if you can get to the top, you can always go to the bottom.

And so there's a little bit of configuration that usually exists that's manually configured in a name server that tells you where the root servers are.

The root servers way back when used to be some number of machines.