Hacker News Reader

Comment by kasey_junk | Hacker News Reader

Pardon my ignorance but in what way are EU citizens dependent on US DNS infrastructure prior to the introduction to this? And how does this infrastructure remove that dependence?

View on HN

All big public DNS Resolvers are US-based. Google, Cloudflare, OpenDNS(Cisco). Quad9 is Swiss-based, so technicaly not EU-based.

All ISPs in my country run their own recursive resolvers (with IPs resolving to my country). How "big" a resolver is does not matter at all - it's not a social network; the resolver either works or it doesn't work.

Some of the root servers are also in the EU, so there is zero dependence on the USA for resolving european ccTLDs.

There is some level of importance in bigness. All the major public resolvers let nameserver operators (well, anyone, really) clear cached records. Which turns out to be a not-uncommon occurrence. I wrote my own DNS server, so I've been paying a ton of attention to this stuff, and I've found several scenarios where website operators (even, for instance, instagram!) seem to have wanted to change some DNS records but weren't happy with the TTLs they'd advertised on them, and instead of waiting them out, just cleared caches with the major resolvers and then gone ahead and turned off the old IPs.

With the end result that I had to go in and remove those records from my cache, too.

> Some of the root servers are also in the EU, so there is zero dependence on the USA for resolving european ccTLDs.

What percentage of the organizations that run the root servers are non-US? There are thirteen logical root servers ([a-m].root-servers.org):

* https://root-servers.org/

Three (i, k, m) are not run by non-US legal entities: Netnod (SE), RIPE (NL), WIDE (JP).

In every way. The US controls the TLDs and many of the core resolvers.

The US doesn't control the national TLDs nor the .eu TLD in any way. The core resolvers can be replaced at a moment's notice in case of problems.

This doesn’t address the tld issue and does it matter if a lot of people use US authoritative resolvers? Each domain can choose and the protocol isn’t biased towards US controlled infrastructure.

I can see the value in dns as public utility (though one I’d be skeptical about using or paying for) but this doesn’t seem to do what the OP suggests on the US independence front because DNS is already independent.

I’d be a lot more understanding of a public email provider than DNS to promote a break with US infrastructure.

Email would be fun. Beyond the rhetoric, a lot of EU governments are actually quite tyrannical when it comes to intercepting or seizing communications, compared to the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com