[colmmacc]

The article suggests that both Google Public DNS and nominum are parent centric, which might be a significant portion of the 3% (or larger at this point).

These days with the number of resolvers that have fall-back catch-all records designed to redirect you to a search / suggest feature, I think that you also need to worry about positive TTLs.

You're right that if a domain is pristine, and has never been queried, that in all likelihood, you'll be able to have it resolvable within minutes, not hours, but this still seems like a relatively uncommon case.

In practice, people do query for their domain as its propagating, and do buy meaningful names that are likely to have some low-level background rate of queries, and there's not much to stop the legion of bots that are watching for whois updates either.

I guess I take the most issue with your headline. DNS taking 48+ hours to propagate is not a myth.