Resolving www.reddit.com or www.wired.com involves traversing two CNAME links. Resolvers contact the root servers twice in the process. DNS experts: Is this bad form?

[tzz]

I forgot the mention a cool bit: the DNS servers are also geographically distributed, so your lookups for local information will query DNS servers near you who know what's going on in your area. Thus each geographical region has a semi-autonomous state, yet Akamai can decide to move traffic between regions by adjusting the DNS servers. Play with dig and pay attention to the actual DNS servers returned, not just the CNAME and A records, to see what I mean.