Amazon Route53 DNS Performance Slowest in Industry

For some of our HTTP requests from the US, Canada, and Europe, 20-45% of response time is spent doing DNS lookup (100ms+). For a hosting provider as widely used as AWS, frankly I find this absurd.

How are they twice as slow as GoDaddy?!

Edit: On the bright side, since so many other DNS providers have solved this problem, it must be solvable. They have the opportunity to speed up a big chunk of the internet in one fell swoop!