special404

Your ISP is not exactly "the internet". Your local ISP does the same thing we do, buy service from someone else - an NSP (Network Service Provider). Major US NSPs include MCI, Sprint, UUNET, AGIS, and BBN. Anyway, DNS is structured as a hierarchy similar to IP routing. No single DNS server hosts the entire DNS database. If a DNS server does not contain the name that is requested, it will be re-directed 'up' the hierarchy until a DNS server is found that can resolve the request. This is where the NSPs come in. Hehe, just realized how old this post was