Google is a business. If they want fault tolerance then they can
Ah, and VeriSign, or VRS, isn't? Or those DNS providers for ORG, INFO, LA, AG, ...?
Most of those registries have signed a Registry Data Escrow Agreement with ICANN and every day they update a copy of the domain registry data that is held by a 3rd party escrow agent. This is because they are operating a service on behalf of ICANN and if they go bakrupt or if they break their ICANN contract then ICANN can take the escrow copy of the data and get someone else to run the TLD registry. Verisign is a business, but the DNS and whois services that they provide are part of the Internet's infrastructure. There is no alternative place to get authoritative mapping of .com domain names to IP addresses or ownership data for a .com domain. In that sense Verisign has no competitors.
buy it from Akamai or else build their own global infrastructure. If Google disappears, we can get similar service from many of their competitors. They aren't part of the infrastructure of the Internet.
But part of the economically critical infrastructure. And it's not the RIR's job to decide whether they better buy the service or provide it themselves. Sorry, this part of the discussion is heading absolutely nowhere.
You're right, I don't know why you headed in that direction. RIPE is concerned with critical Internet infrastructure and not with critical economic infrastructure. --Michael Dillon