Prior to this, ICANN performed management responsibility under oversight of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency of the United States Department of Commerce.
[9] While it is possible to fit more entries into a packet of this size when using label compression, thirteen was chosen as a reliable limit.
Since the introduction of IPv6, the successor Internet Protocol to IPv4, previous practices are being modified and extra space is filled with IPv6 name servers.
The root name servers are hosted in multiple secure sites with high-bandwidth access to accommodate the traffic load.
[11] The modern trend is to use anycast addressing and routing to provide resilience and load balancing across a wide geographic area.
In 1997, when the Internet was transferred from U.S. government control to private hands, NTIA exercised stewardship over the root zone.
[5] According to Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, Lawrence E. Strickling, March 2014 was the right time to start a transition of the role to the global Internet community.
The chairman of the board of ICANN denied the two were connected, however, and said the transition process had been ongoing for a long time.
[5][13] On March 11, 2016, NTIA announced that it had received a proposed plan to transition its stewardship role over the root zone, and would review it in the next 90 days.
As a component of the transition plan,[15] it created a new subsidiary called Public Technical Identifiers (PTI) to perform the IANA functions which include managing the DNS root zone.