Who cares if it works in places that won't play nice? They're digging their own grave if they don't publish, and only hurting themselves. The nice thing about massively distributed systems is that they can be as reliable as the people who depend on them need them to be, with the relevant authorities having the option to be as real or as clowny as they want to be.

That said, I would never respect the DNS TTL of such a scheme, for my own use cases. I'd query each of them once an hour, latch the last response forever, and delay propagation of a new response for a full week that it stayed stable before serving the new record.

> Who cares if it works in places that won't play nice? They're digging their own grave if they don't publish, and only hurting themselves.

The timezone database was not created for the benefit of governments, it was created for the benefit of users and vendors.

People who have to live their lives under corrupt/incompetent governments have enough problems on their plate already, without the added indignity of making it harder for them to get their computers to show the correct local time.

Who maintains what time it was in Yugoslavia in 1970? Or Serbia? What country maintains the time information for the island of Taiwan? Or Hong Kong while under British rule or while under Japanese rule?

It might be possible to use that for the information of now - to answer the question of "what is local time for me based on UTC?" or "what is local time for someone else now?" ... but what about the information of yesterday? When it was 12:01 PM in Chicago in 1948, what time was it in Hong Kong?

You would care if you want to track the hostile countries local time.