...will go down in history as famous last words, in the same vein as "What's the worst that could happen?"

or indeed, as many will know: "How hard can it be?"

> ICANN would probably like to move DNS away from the US.

Uhh, several of the root servers already anycast from outside the US, in fact from many places all over the globe:

http://www.root-servers.org/

To date, F, I, J, K, and M all have nodes outside North America and thus outside the US. It makes sense - why confine yourself to a single location far away from many of your consumers?

this is (or should be) a non-event.

When BIND starts up, it doesn't use it's root hints file as-is, it uses them a list of server that it can then contact to get an up to date list. So it only needs one of them to be contactable for it to get an up to date list - after that it's business as usual.

I would hope that all implementations would do the same, but then you never know what clever implementation ideas someone might have come up with !