Date   : Fri, 08 Jul 2005 08:30:55 +0100 (BST)
From   : gARetH baBB <hick.bbc@...>
Subject: Re: Introducing 'BeebWiki' the Wiki dedicated to

On Thu, 7 Jul 2005, Brian Widdas wrote:

> People who use alternative root servers are way out on the side of the
> internet lunatic fringe, though, and can generally be safely ignored.

Along with people who reply to mailing lists and email.

Most of China and Turkey amongst others seems to be moving over to some 
use of alternative roots, if only for the language support - but the 
political reasons are growing too (again China has a good reason here), 
especially in light of recent announcements concerning ICANN.

The ICANN root isn't in such a strong position as some would like you to 
believe. There is still a long way to go before it tumbles, but the 
"lunatic fringe" is surely creeping up.

Even though it's not the right way of doing it, new.net signed up a number 
of large ISPs to support its superset TLDs, including Energis, Tiscali and 
Earthlink - as all of the Freeserve userbase, all of the Tiscali userbase 
have some access to some form of alternative root, you would have to say 
the fringe is actually quite large for a fringe ...

Though I expect the Chinese userbase, sorry fringe, swamps the non-fringe 
element if only in terms of numbers.