[schanzen]

It is important to distinguish the technical procedure of resolving a name with the namespace governance.

You could imagine a system where you manage your DNS root zone locally ("hyperlocal") and there is NO consensus on what it contains. The DNS resolution mechanism could support such a concept. It is only the de-facto rule of ICANN over the root zone what makes DNS names globally unique. And IETF/Standards do not allow to diverge from this.

The GNS specification explicitly allows it. That is it. It does not mandate that users must bootstrap their root using fancy hand-picked petnames. In practice, a common set of root zone entries will very likely exists. The specification does not mandate the governance.

There could be a world in which DNS names as we know them today are resolved using the GNS resolution mechanism with no tangible difference to the user.