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Comment by supertrope | Hacker News Reader

Hard coding DNS removes a troubleshooting variable and decreases customer support load and return rates. Some ISPs hijack DNS to serve up search ads (when it’s not down or slow). Some routers are part of botnets so DNS is not to be trusted.

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There are definitely good reasons why manufacturers do this, but in a perfect world it would be possible for the user to control this feature. (on the device itself, I know you can usually control this if you have a nice router)

Or you will be able to, until the manufacturers catch up with DNS over HTTPS. So, you know, in another 10 years.

Also the ISP DNS is sometimes just unreliable. Not malicious, just bad.

I once had Windows Update broken by my ISP DNS. It was just returning the wrong IP, maybe an old one, not sure.

Perhaps companies should hire more talented customer service representatives who have a technical background instead of continuing to make their products shittier.

Having worked in this kind of customer support, the issue isn't that technician doesn't understand DNS, but rather that the end user frequently hadn't even heard of it. It's a massive pain to troubleshoot something like that remotely when the caller is non-technical. Not impossible of course, but frustrating and requiring a great deal of patience on both ends.

I'm sure that's quite common, but so is the reverse. Almost universally, CSRs have no idea how the product works or have any technical knowledge whatsoever.

Also, if their ISP-provided router got owned by a virus and is now part of a botnet, how is the end user going to fix that? Many of those devices are locked down. It may not be a problem they can solve without manually configuring every device to use 8.8.8.8, so now every device needs to have a full flow for configuring its DNS servers. I'm personally in favor of every device having that option but it's also the case that the vast majority of people will not benefit from their TVs and lightbulbs having customizable DNS.

> Perhaps companies should hire more talented customer service representatives who have a technical background instead of continuing to make their products shittier.

Most people with technical skills would not settle for being customer service representatives when they can make far more money by putting those skills to work in technical roles.

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