No. While root servers are NOT sacrosanct, if such a court action were to occur and a root server operator were to carry it out, the change would fail DNSSEC va

No. While root servers are NOT sacrosanct, if such a court action were to occur and a root server operator were to carry it out, the change would fail DNSSEC validation in resolvers that have DNSSEC enabled (which varies depending on where you are, see https://stats.labs.apnic.net/dnssec https://stats.labs.apnic.net/dnssec), resulting in a SERVFAIL. In such cases, resolvers generally try another root server, until it gets a non-SERVFAIL answer, so for this to have the desired effect, you'd have to get all the root servers to implement the same change. This would be unlikely. However, the root server operators merely publish what ICANN (via the IANA functions) produces. If the US (either federal or perhaps even the states of California or Virginia) were to decide to "censor" a TLD in the root zone, they would simply go to ICANN, PTI (the folks who provide the IANA functions under contract to ICANN) or, more likely, Verisign (who generate and publish the root zone under contract to ICANN) and demand the root zone be modified.