Slashdot

The roots and TLDs are *more* than capable of handling requests from every device on the internet, without caching. There is a simple proof for this: They *did so* - users will regularly make typos in their browsers, queries for these non-existent domains will go out to the "." and (if the TLD is valid) to the TLDs.

Perhaps this decreased a little since browsers started diverting things typed into the address bar to search engines.

However, the fact remains that the roots and TLDs *already* get hit by queries from *every* device with an interactive user, as well as any which happen to query for some misconfigured or no longer valid hostname. The . and TLDs are *already* setup to handle this kind of load, cause they already get it.

What the intermediate caches do is:

a) Not provide effective caching (distribution of queries is very long tailed) - see e.g. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=581877 (and I think there's a more recent ISOC article that found the same thing)

b) Potentially add latency - it may take longer for your computer to get its answer.

c) Provide a huge, juicy target for attackers - a DNS poisoning attack is so much more efficient if you poison a widely shared cache.