Comment by nathanlied | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathanlied | Hacker News Reader

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> Its distributed nature means there are technical performance advantages to doing the above: reduced request latency, localized traffic routing and reduced bandwidth, etc. You don’t need a giant any cast network to serve DNS. You just need to use the servers closest to you.

My issue with this is that I've never been with an ISP that had a faster response time than Cloudflare/Google - and one would think they should, after all, my ISP should be able to reach me as quickly (or quicker) than any other corporation.

My current ISP has the fastest DNS benchmarks I've seen, and they're at 81ms for an uncached response, vs Cloudflare's 63ms and Google's 69ms. Cached response is similar (since I have a local cache).

In addition, my ISP does not provide DoH/DNSCrypt/DNSSec. None. Just 'vanilla' DNS. Furthermore, they also don't provide an unaltered DNS service: they block some websites from resolving, the list isn't made available, and is decided via extrajudicial means. You cannot opt-out, and all ISPs in the country adhere to this. They're not forced by law to do so. I'm also not in a normally thought of as a repressive country: it's a member state of the European Union, after all.

There are very good reasons for people to be outright hostile to ISPs and their shady underhanded practices, as you're seeing in this discussion. I feel that it is in any mostly online-based organisation's best interests to expose those practices.

> In addition, my ISP does not provide DoH/DNSCrypt/DNSSec. None. Just 'vanilla' DNS. Furthermore, they also don't provide an unaltered DNS service: they block some websites from resolving, the list isn't made available, and is decided via extrajudicial means. You cannot opt-out, and all ISPs in the country adhere to this. They're not forced by law to do so. I'm also not in a normally thought of as a repressive country: it's a member state of the European Union, after all.

Would Cloudflare/Google?

Many of us do consider EU nations repressive states, especially as regards protections for unpopular speech (and armed self-defense, but that's less relevant here).

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Personal freedoms are awful in the EU, but it's in exchange for increased safety and economic stability. Obviously an amazing tradeoff.

It's quite possible that EU member states simply have different philosophical views and considerations as to the value and effects of freedom of speech. In fact, the United States is quite exceptional, but it too draws the line somewhere (assault, threats, child pornography).

Yes, that's probably true. Just because I say repressive in a pejorative tone doesn't mean the people who live in those states are bothered by it. They may prefer not to have to hear some of the speech I find regrettable but a necessary cost of freedom. (I think there's a very good argument for drawing the line where the US does and not somewhere else, but that's a different matter.)

I'm taking issue at the hyperbolic nature of the comment. I'm not an ISP apologist. But to say there are zero technical reasons for an ISP to want to provide DNS is unfair and incorrect.

Cloudflare and Google pay ISPs for the latency they get, FWIW. If I made my own resolver service today I would not be able to compete with your ISP without forking over $$$.

Do peering agreements usually have money exchanged if they're already both at the same IX?

> Cloudflare and Google pay ISPs for the latency they get, FWIW. If I made my own resolver service today I would not be able to compete with your ISP without forking over $$$.

I think the main reason for this is even if your competitor grew like a weed, it would be a decade or two before you had the scale to justify rolling out a CDN/caching infrastructure like that of cloudflare. That's not a matter of simply paying ISPs money.

I don't really understand why you keep repeating this claim that we're arguing that there are zero technical reasons for an ISP to want to provide DNS. No one is saying that.

Perhaps you misunderstood my original topelevel comment. If that's the case, let me try to clarify: ISPs have zero technical reasons to complain that people are using alternative resolvers. I totally see why they want to provide DNS resolvers, and that makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, part of that "want" is so they can sell DNS query data to third parties, which is just another reason why I don't want to use them.

Yeah that’s what happened my bad. Anyway, see my other comment: I still don’t think simply being able to choose your resolver as a consumer is enough. We need to defend against abuse technically and socially. It really shouldn’t matter which DNS provider you do use.

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