Anyone can use any DNS servers they want. These ones are run by the US Government because the US Government created them. It would be almost trivial for a cou

Anyone can use any DNS servers they want. These ones are run by the US Government because the US Government created them. It would be almost trivial for a country, or group of countries to set up their own root servers and mandate that operating system vendors include them if they want to continue selling in their country. Then if there was something hosted on their servers everyone wanted to get to, it would spread outside of those countries by demand. ...But it isn't even necessary now with all the extra TLDs. If a government or organization wants to start a non profit TLD that just charges the bare minimum, they can do it without fragmenting themselves. edit: In about 2004 a group of friends and I ran our own servers with SOAs for our own TLDs that we replicated to each other. It had a total of 3 useless websites, and 5 users, and only lasted a few months, but it was neat.