[dns-operations] Happy birthday .ASIA

Fri May 4 07:30:26 UTC 2007

On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 10:08:03PM -0700,
 Doug Barton <dougb at dougbarton.us> wrote 
 a message of 29 lines which said:

> I realize I'm a little late, but .ASIA entered the root last night 

What is the authoritative source for TLDs? I always thought it was
IANA. Am I wrong?

% whois -h whois.iana.org ASIA
Domain asia. not found.  Please note that this whois server 
only provides information for a very few domains.

May be this is because the IANA and the ICANN do not really exist and
the root is managed by another entity, located on the east coast?