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Comment by michaelcampbell | Hacker News Reader

If memory serves, Netflix users discovered that Akamai is using this strategy and everyone coming in from Google's DNS or OpenDNS was getting put into the same 'pool', and overloading the pipes in that pool. The recommendation was to use your ISP's DNS at least for your Netflix devices.

Or have I misunderstood?

(Post should probably have had the date listed; just realized this article is 7 years old. That doesn't make it wrong or bad, mind you...)

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This isn't true for Google. Akamai has all kinds of archaic network issues that cause problems, but it isn't often OpenDNS related. They certainly do their best, and know our network map well as we send it to them whenever it changes.

For Google -- If you use OpenDNS, you will always go to the most appropriate Google datacenter to you (not OpenDNS).

THIS. Akamai is using technology designed in 1998. I wish they would work with opendns to fix it.

Akamai's not doing anything wrong.

OpenDNS is a broken concept.

Akamai only worked right 75% of the time even when it was first launched. Large ISPs that operated a single set of DNS servers for nationwide customers had the same problems.

All OpenDNS did was start offering the same thing ISPs already did as an external service.

How so? DNS was never designed to be used as a geolocation vector, as far as I have ever heard, so relying on it to be one does seem "wrong".

OpenDNS defaults to resolving non-existant domains as search results, bereaking DNS. You can turn it off, if you have a static IP.

I see. That doesn't seem to me to be a "broken concept", however, but a rather minor misfeature. I may have misread the poster to which I was responding, but his assertion seems to read to me that OpenDNS as a whole is fundamentally wrong or broken, and that Akamai is using the idea of DNS for something it was never intended to be is "correct". Both of those statements do not ring true.

This has nothing to do with Akamai being able to target users accurately. Google doesn't have this issue, so why does Akamai?

That's simply not true. Please argue with facts.

Fixed the title. The sad thing is that not much has been invented since then to aid with global load balancing.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-sub... is an RFC to fix this problem.

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