TLD nameservers that also cache?

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Brad" == Brad Knowles <blk at skynet.be> writes:

    Brad> 	The only other solution I can think of is to change
    Brad> the behaviour of caching/recursive nameservers.  Instead of
    Brad> having it go all the way to the root nameservers and ask the
    Brad> question "www.skynet.be/IN/A", and following the referral,
    Brad> it should assume that the higher level nameservers are
    Brad> non-caching and reduce the query appropriately.  In this
    Brad> case, it should ask them "be/IN/NS", follow the referrals to
    Brad> the nameservers for ".be", then ask "skynet.be/IN/NS" to one
    Brad> or more of them, and then and only then should it finally
    Brad> ask the question "www.skynet.be/IN/A".

Aside from the problems of updating RFC103[45] and getting the new
code written and deployed, I don't think this would work. What about
non-terminal names that don't have a zone cut? Suppose www.skynet.be
existed but there was no skynet.be zone? And what about intranets that
have their own internal roots and could be playing by different rules
about where Nth-Level domain servers handle recursive queries? Maybe
they don't have any top-level zones at all and delegate foo.com,
bar.be, etc directly off their own root zone?