India Asks ICANN for Local Root Server to Cut US Dependency

India's government has formally asked ICANN to locate a root server in the country, a senior official said Friday. Speaking at a NIXI event, Ministry of Electronics and IT Secretary S Krishnan said one server should be placed in India to serve the nation's internet user base. "We have been pushing for locating a root server in India given the number of people who use the internet and in terms of long-term resilience of the internet system itself," Krishnan said.

Root servers are the internet's core address books. When someone types a website or sends an email, the query goes to one of 13 root nameserver operators, mostly based in the United States, which resolve the domain and direct the user. A server inside India would cut round-trip time to a fraction of the current latency. That matters for algorithmic traders, cloud infrastructure, and real-time video services that lose milliseconds on each DNS lookup. Algo trading feeds, streaming platforms, and video-conferencing apps all depend on fast resolution – a local root server would shave off roughly 50–70 milliseconds on average per request.

Most governments have pushed for locational diversity in root server placement, citing security and cyber espionage risks from concentrating the system in one country. India's request follows that global trend. During a coordinated attack on US-based root servers, queries from Indian users could continue uninterrupted through a local copy.