domains have no afŽ liation to any particular nation and they include the .com, .org and
.net domains. The nTLDs indicate the country of registration of the domain name, for
example, .au for Australia, .nz for New Zealand.
The domain name system operates by a hierarchical system of name servers. At each
domain level, a name server maintains a table of names and it points all enquiries to the
name server registered for that name. Each name server in the hierarchy directs trafŽ c
through to the next level, which then selects the desired destination in the following level.
Therefore, when a user requests www.mq.edu.au, the World Root will be consulted to
establish the IP address of the .au name server and the .au name server will receive a query
and will direct trafŽ c to the .edu.au name server, which will then direct trafŽ c to the
.mq.edu.au name server. If any of the name servers do not maintain absolute integrity, the
user will not be routed to the correct IP address as there is no other way of determining
which domain name attaches to which IP address. It is this imperative which demands a
rigorous system of veriŽ cation, maintenance and security of name servers.
From the foregoing, it is quite clear that the internet can do without the domain name
system. Computers on the internet can function perfectly with IP addresses only without
any reference to domain names. Purely from a functional aspect, the domain name system
is super uous to the internet. Be that as it may, the domain name system has  ourished and
developed in the past few years and so has the institutional structures that support and
govern it. Prior to 1999, the gTLDs were administered by a single registry and a single
registrar, as were each of the nTLDs. In the USA and for the gTLDs, this agency was called
InterNIC. Internic was a cooperative of the National Science Foundation (NSF), AT&T,