ISTANBUL, on the sidelines of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF)
Today, I was very happy to facilitate the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding on L-Root Collaboration with Paul Wilson, Director General of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) and Fadi Chehadé, President and CEO of ICANN.
In our region where relationships are important for "doing business", I am confident that through APNIC's strong network of relationships, we will be able to increase the effectiveness of our outreach to promote the hosting of L-Root server nodes in our region, and in doing so, contribute towards a more stable, secure and resilient DNS system globally.
For the uninitiated, the Root DNS System provides for the "root zone" which basically answers the question of "which server to contact to for which top level domain". This is the key function your computer performs when searching for the website you typed into your browser. The authoritative name servers that serve the DNS root zone are commonly known as "root servers". These DNS Servers are configured in the DNS root zone as 13 named authorities, from "A" – "L". ICANN maintains the L-Root server (the full list of Root Server Operators can be found at: http://www.iana.org/domains/root/servers).
DNS servers are potential points of failure for the entire Internet. For this reason, multiple root servers are distributed worldwide across the Internet. More root server nodes hosted in the region means more redundancies, allowing for the DNS to handle more traffic and, more importantly, increase its resiliency to attacks.
This MOU solidifies and further elevates the close partnership shared between ICANN and APNIC which already covers a wide array of areas, from IP addressing to Internet Governance and capacity building.
Maintaining the Stability, Security and Resiliency of the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) is a key pillar of ICANN's work, and with the signing of this MOU, we are very happy to have APNIC partner with us in this area. The MOU paves the way for us to leverage APNIC's well-established and extensive network in the Asia Pacific region to identify and reach out to interested parties – organisations, companies, network operators – who would like to host an L-Root server node.
From the ICANN Asia Pacific Hub, I am proud to be part of this partnership with APNIC which has grown from strength to strength. I would like to express my appreciation to our friends Paul Wilson, as well as Sanjaya (Deputy Director General of APNIC), for sharing such a vision with us and for making this a reality.
For more information regarding the L-root server, and if you are interested in hosting an L-Root server node in your location, please visit http://www.dns.icann.org/lroot/host/
Kuek Yu-Chuang is the Vice President and Managing Director of ICANN Asia Pacific Hub