I'm much more concerned by the amount of money we owe China than their desire to run their own root servers. As of June 2005, we owe foreign governments three trillion dollars, hundreds of billions to China alone. I heard a projection the other day that at the current borrowing rate, we'll owe China over one trillion dollars by 2008.
I'm not an expert on government finance, but something about owing trillions of dollars to the rest of the world is a little disturbing. I know I'd be very concerned if I spent more than I made AND I had debt half again more than my entire annual salary. Hopefully, smarter people than me are sure that's OK [
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I get my data from:
http://www.fms.treas.gov/bulletin/b35.pdf
http://www.fms.treas.gov/bulletin/index.html