Joe Abley;
I don't think this is an oversight, I'm pretty sure this was
intentional. However, since in practice the BGP best path selection
algorithm boils down to looking at the AS path length and this has the
tendency to be the same length for many paths, BGP is fairly useless
for deciding the best path for even low ambition definitions of the word.
For the service aspects of F we're more concerned with reliability than
performance. Recursive resolvers ask questions to the root relatively
infrequently, and the important thing is that they have *a* path to use
to talk to a root server, not necessarily that they are able to
automagically select the instance with the lowest instantaneous RTT (and
continue to find a root regardless of what damage might exist in the
network elsewhere).
I'm afraid F servers does not follow the intention of my original
proposal of anycast root servers.
The intention is to allow millions or trillions of root servers.
While you can rely on someone else's root server with the BGP
best path selection, it is a lot better to have your own
root server.
In addition, it is not necessary to have any hierarchy between
anycast servers at all, as long as there is a single source of
information. Hierarchy may be useful if a single entity manages
all the anycast root servers. However, you can manage your own.
Finally, using only a single address, F, does not provide any
real robustness.
Masataka Ohta