Services such as your ISP's or Google's DNS servers are not "independent" in the same sense as AlterNIC. They still defer to the root DNS servers (the servers n

Services such as your ISP's or Google's DNS servers are not "independent" in the same sense as AlterNIC. They still defer to the root DNS servers (the servers named after the letters of the alphabet mentioned in the article) and are basically just proxies or caches. An alternate DNS /root/ would also mean an alternate place to go to register domain names, which is what is meant by fracturing - google.com may point to different IP addresses depending on your root. You are correct that widely trusted DNS servers could potentially hijack people even now, but it is a slightly different problem to the one being discussed in the article.