http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,16559,1589967,00.html

oh no!!

Excellent, EXCELLENT! We will all have Mini-nets that will be within our own area codes, and we will only be able to use phone lines because major ISP's will crumble with no single Internet to provide.

We will call them:

B B S's

Worrysome, were it ever to happen. Catastrophic? who knows.

IMNSHO, if it's not broken, don't fix it.

Meh. There's already several organizations that have wanted more control over TLDs than ICANN gives, and they just started running their own root DNS servers. For example: before ICANN authorized the .biz TLD, it was already in use by the Pacific Root DNS servers. It's not difficult to create or use alternative root DNS servers. The only potential problem is if competing root DNS servers assign different addresses to the same fully-qualified domain name. But that isn't likely to be more than a moderate annoyance.

Clickies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
http://www.orsn.org/
http://www.opennic.unrated.net/
http://www.pacificroot.com/

It won't split unless those other countries deliberately change who the primary name servers are. I can actually see some repressive dictatorship trying that one, but it won't affect the rest of us.

It's not like Europe is going to remove the .com domain or randomly decide to change a primary nameserver, which is about the only control you have from the root level.

Oh, and like 98% of the requests that make it to the root servers are mistakes like bad addresses. The primary name servers (one step below root) already have most addresses cached.