On Sun, 01 Jun 2014, Jerry Stuckle wrote:
There are 13 root servers, all over the world. Root servers are
owned by various organizations and managed by ICANN. The US
Department of Commerce has nothing to do with them.
No, there are hundreds of them.
http://www.root-servers.org/
There are approximately 377 root-server instances, some of those are rather
large and powerful clusters with global visibility, but many are single
boxes and small clusters only reachable by directly-connected networks
(hosted in IXPs, usually).
It is all hidden behind just a few anycast addresses.
http://blog.icann.org/2007/11/there-are-not-13-root-servers/
I'll believe this official statement from ICANN over a blog...
Brazil alone has at least 19 dns root name server instances (e-, f-, i-, j-
and l-root). I know that first hand: I've seen two of the l-root single-box
instances (and helped install one of them), as well as the i-root cluster
instance.