Importance of encrypted DNS?

Karate_Jesus420@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 69 points –

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but how important is using one of the encrypted DNS services from the megathread? I've just been using Google's DNS servers directly on my router, and have yet to have any issues. Have I just been lucky?

Also, 🫡 to dbzer0 for migrating the community to Lemmy!

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If you don't want to spend money, use 1.1.1.1 at least. It's important.

I'd actually suggest using Quad9 DNS.

What advantage does Quad9 have over Cloudflares DoT?

Quad9 is based in Switzerland where privacy laws are stricter, most notably the one where they cannot cooperate with foreign intelligence agencies without approval from the Swiss government. Quad9 keeps no logs, while Cloudflare does for 25 hours.

Cloudflare already routes practically all of the internet, why would you explicitly want to also use their DNS?

Because we want the internet to be centralized to like 3 companies that run everything!

Cloudflare is the fastest and well if you use one of the sites proxied by them then they have your data anyways

Speed at any cost, some might value the small privacy gain for the few extra millisecond DNS queries. Which can also be cached locally so only the first one would be slow anyway.

You have forgotten Akamai... Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon... Also Equinix and descendants of those once nationalized telephone and telegram operators, e.g. AT&T, BT, NTT, etc.

Upon a quick search here it seem cloudflares does roughly 1/5th of all websites measured. Still pretty huge. You can use whatever serves your own needs best, but I try to avoid using these kinds of megacorp "free" services. Its not too hard to run your own authoritative DNS as well, since DNS is decentralized natively.

If you check the Submarine Cable Map, you can find all the cables we have laid under the sea and their owners. The Mozilla Internet Health Report 2019 contains a map that shows cable ownership by the big 4 aka Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon. The map was updated to contain data till 2021. The L1 is largely owned by the telecom operators, private or national. Cloudflare is just L2 and L3 (maybe some L7).

I think we're at a misunderstanding. If a business owns a road, and a different business owns a shipping company that uses the road. If I want to ship something, I can choose which shipping company to use, and I cannot choose which roads they use. So given my options, wouldn't I want to choose the best shipping company for my needs?

In this analogy, I don't trust Cloudflare shipping company. Especially with how often they are used for SSL termination. This community specifically, places a massive importance on verifying and checking VPN providers, why not be equally as stringent with DNS providers?