[judge2020]

All roads lead to . [0], ie. IANA. Many IANA-approved entities run them[1], but they all only resolve TLDs ICANN authorizes (and those TLD operators control what domains are registered under their TLD, of course).

0: https://dns.google/query?name=.&rr_type=NS&ecs=

1: https://www.iana.org/domains/root/servers