Hi David,

On 2 Nov 2025, at 16:09, David Malone <dwmalone@maths.tcd.ie> wrote:

Years ago, when I worked for ICANN doing DNS things, we created the xfr.lax.dns.icann.org and xfr.cjr.dns.icann.org services in order to provide AXFR access to zones that we served on L-Root. I assume those are the ancestors of the similarly-named services described at https://www.dns.icann.org/services/axfr/

The operational idea was to be able not to provide AXFR on L-Root itself so that L could concentrate on being a root server and not have the additional job of providing zone transfer responses.

The public transparency idea was to make all the public zones we served available, not just the root zone, because why wouldn't we, somebody might find them useful. 

To be clear I haven't worked for ICANN for a long time and I'm very sure that the current ICANN DNS people are much more competent than I ever was, but in case it's useful that's my memory of the history. 

Joe