How much EU is in DNS4EU?
techlog.jenslink.net
techlog.jenslink.net
I'd prefer that they weren't spending funds on using US infrastructure for their marketing (and hopefully this publicity will effect a change), but its a real stretch to make out that it in any way undermines the mission of dns4eu - namely providing a public resolver that isn't slurping up request data for their own purposes.
I suspect people pushing to host websites in the EU will default to using American DNS and email providers etc.
The real problem is lack of motivation, not lack of options and it is a lot easier for people to keep on using Cloudflare and Gmail and AWS etc.
Nothing gets done without some pragmatism.
On the other hand there are lots of good options for hosting a website or email in the EU (and even more if you are also happy to host elsewhere in Europe).
Pragmatism is one thing, zero effort is another.
Allow me to make an analogy: imagine someone switching to Linux desktop and then installing Slack or Discord because they can't be bothered to convince other people to use Matrix. Is that completely unacceptable or is it a healthy compromise and still a win overall?
It's also highly unlikely that the group of people working on that DNS resolver is the same group of people that made a website for it, as these sorts of sites tend to be outsourced to some tiny web design companies. One of my previous jobs was in one of those tiny companies and a part of my responsiblity was to maintain some of Eurotunnel's servers, so would you blame me for their decision to rebrand themselves to far less descriptive Getlink which happened around the same time?
It is irrelevant to their narrow goal, but it is very much relevant to their broader goal.
> Allow me to make an analogy: imagine someone switching to Linux desktop and then installing Slack or Discord because they can't be bothered to convince other people to use Matrix.
That is a very different situation. There are no real barriers to an organisation choosing to host its websites where ever they choose.
> It's also highly unlikely that the group of people working on that DNS resolver is the same group of people that made a website for it,
That is often true, but in this case it implies management do not understand, or are not committed to the underlying goals. It would be very easy to have insisted that all hosting is in Europe.
> One of my previous jobs was in one of those tiny companies and a part of my responsiblity was to maintain some of Eurotunnel's servers, so would you blame me for their decision to rebrand themselves to far less descriptive Getlink
Not you, but I would blame their management.
Airbus used american products and customers to get big and then built european alternatives, it just makes a ton more sense.
After the last election, they decided that it's not safe in the long term, and started to build their own infra. It'll take some time.
Given that one of the EU's aims is to be a peer to the US and China (the term I recall them using is a "multi-polar world") they should not be reliant on anyone to this extent.
Similar background, a long history of standing together (e.g. the war, marshall plans, NATO etc)
Trump is pretty unprecedented, even though some previous presidents weren't very friendly with the EU (like the "Freedom Fries" issue under George W Bush, when France opposed the invasion of Iraq - which eventually ended up based on complete lies so the French were totally right).
> Given that one of the EU's aims is to be a peer to the US and China (the term I recall them using is a "multi-polar world") they should not be reliant on anyone to this extent.
True. Europe has been too comfortable with the situation. It's also because it's hard to get everyone aligned. Politics is very nation-aligned, not EU-aligned.
There is a reference to their cookie policy but to link to it.
Honestly this "deep dive" borders on self loathing
"oh but their email is not in the EU" ok it's a fair criticism, but for some people nothing is good enough
Then we wonder why nothing goes ahead in the EU because once you do something it gets flooded with tire kickers and bikeshedders criticizing everything
> Europeans can’t do web and mail. There is absolutely no provider here who can do such complicated tasks.
We really can't, though. Because it's not just web and mail, it's Cloudflare and Google Workspace. There just are no EU alternatives for this. There just aren't. You can do parts of it, of course, but if you're running a business, you can't waste endless resources on building your own internal Cloudflare and Google Workspace alternative.
This is a real problem and I wish there were more real alternatives to services like these. Even Proton, which arguably replaces parts of Google Workspace, isn't even EU-based.
Thanks a ton.
Large actors can do it because they have other revenue sources, and they have resources to deal with the legal matters.
I am not saying regulations are bad, they are not, but every paragraph takes a small piece of the cake. And the cake is not infinite, so at a certain point people will go away because "I earn more on doing something else".
Not exactly. The EU regional market fragmentation and domestic protectionism of each country is a way bigger nerf to scaling tech companies domestically.
That's why all EU tech unirons aim straight for the US to sell their products/services there first, and only once they reach escape velocity there, then open themselves to EU customers.
and likely Google/MSFT will deploy a copy here ran without direct interference from the US, and it'll probably chug along until the first really big lawful intercept disagreement (but there are a bunch of "mutual legal assistance treaties" so it'll take a while, and by then AI will eat us for paperclip NFTs anyway)
Cloudflare I don't know if there are good competitors by my own experience, but some are listed here: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/cloudflare
*except email-server which although easy to add on trough stalwart or external email provider is technically not part of the nextcloud ecosystem (webmail is however)
But no, Nextcloud is not comparable to Google Workspace. Not as a user (their office web implementation is spotty at best, constantly crashes and disconnects; their calendar, meeting and chat apps are barebones; the clients regularly corrupt files or have issues syncing, etc.), and definitely not as an administrator: You have to constantly deal with manually updating the instance, re-enabling "incompatible" apps for some reason, deal with the updater taking 4 hours to download the zip file because their servers are overloaded again, updating the database server or PHP version because it will soon no longer be supported, etc. How is that better than having to navigate the Google Workspace admin interface every few months?
Sure, it does not have everything Google has, but I mainly need Mail and Calendar, and for this it’s great. They are also working on a Drive.
And also, you have to start somewhere. And the American companies often employ business practices we frown on here. Like Google datamining their users. Microsoft linking their services together and abusing their market position. Meta pirating to train their AIs.
Without those things the services will be more expensive, but they'll also be more honourable. I see a lot of people really defeatist these days "why care about privacy because you have none anyway" and this is mostly because of American companies.
> you can't waste endless resources on building your own internal Cloudflare
The EU has multiple level 1 network operators that would be ideally positioned to build an alternative to Cloudfare if it was truly required. It’s not like they start from zero.
because the CEO of a company based on a different continent got suckered into believing Trump's campaign promises, which were mostly pretty decent... you're now doubting wherever the company he's the CEO of actually wants to monitor it's users?
I mean it was obvious that Trumps administration was gonna be spicy to say the least - but their messaging was most definitely way closer aligned to the working man vs the campaign Harrises team cooked up.
I wouldn't fault him at all, he likely just watched a Trump clip and posted his comment without any deeper meaning.
He definitely shouldn't have made that comment, but everyone makes the occasional not particularly well thought out statement... And he's a human too - and self aware enough to have other people/his employees overrule whatever he personally wants to say.
I'm not a proton user myself though. I believe the clients are the only parts that are open source, and a closed source backend thats security oriented is an oxymoron as far as I'm concerned. But I'm not particularly informed about proton either, so ymmv.
> and a closed source backend thats security oriented is an oxymoron as far as I'm concerned.
Exactly. You're basically just trusting that this guy will always make the right decisions. I remember being in the same boat with Google. Don't be evil and all that.
yes, same for GMX
Doesnt this count?
Sure, not file & coop workspace etc., but it works quite well for me for more than 25 years
ns1.deSEC.io. -> 45.54.76.1 NetName: NETACTUATE-MDN-01 OrgName: NetActuate, Inc City: Raleigh
ns2.desec.org. -> 157.53.224.1 NetName: NETACTUATE-MDN-04 OrgName: NetActuate, Inc City: Raleigh
With that being said actually depends on what is good enough for you, but it's relatively clear that the DNS resolver IPs that are looking up are based in the czech republic.
As I mentioned in another comment "207 Regent Street" (the address in their whois) is a well known virtual office type address in the UK.
As someone (who himself is admittedly in the UK) who is desperately trying to move more more to European products, this kind of absolutism it's just really exhausting on should really be a shared goal. I will happily use/buy good services from the UK,EU,Swiss,etc etc if they are comparable (even just for my own feature use case) to the US ones.
See https://flashstart.com/opendns-not-available-in-france-and-p... and similar
Also they don't seem to block Russia Today, which might be required in other countries? But that might be on a different layer. Not up to date on that.
The latter seems more likely - it's much easier to regulate businesses providing a defined service rather than all servers supporting an arbitrary protocol.
edit: it seems it's local court orders, ordering those specific companies to poison the DNS; it's not a law. So DNS4EU is fine for now.
207 Regent Street, it's a relatively well known virtual office type address, I would be shocked to learn that there were any datacamp employees at that address)
and one can see that they essentially have 2 upstream peers, one from HU and the other from GB, which is the main point of discussion here and open to scrutiny for sure.
IP's listed here are in CZ.
Should we also take into account the owner of the fiber that the dns requests travel on? The manufacturer of any hardware used along the way?
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe"
And don't forget, since January this year a lot of those far-fetched ridiculous possibilities have proven to be reality and not so far-fetched at all. Though I'm sure this project has been in the works for much longer, it's certainly well-timed.
> ns63.cloudns.net.
> ns64.cloudns.uk.
> ns61.cloudns.net.
And US and UK have control over the TLDs of the nameservers.
If someone operates a network, it is really trivial to setup a recursive server for that network.
> Last time I checked GB was not part of the EU. And it’s also a member of FIVE eyes.
I don't think they need to worry about the FIVE eyes when the "FIVE eyes plus 3", "Nine Eyes", and "Fourteen Eyes" contain several EU countries. The larger groups aren't working together as intensively but it's not like cutting off the UK is going to stop the US from the (industrial) espionage they do in the EU.
$ dig ns joindns4.eu +short
ns63.cloudns.net.
ns64.cloudns.uk.
ns61.cloudns.net.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server
To be honest, setting up a DNS4EU replica would just be a simple unbound
the only thing you might have to adjust is the access control
https://www.linuxbabe.com/ubuntu/set-up-unbound-dns-resolver...
access-control: 10.0.0.0/8 allow
access-control: 127.0.0.1/24 allow
access-control: 2001:DB8::/64 allowThe ENTIRE point is to be a publicly funded middleman that doesn’t collect or expose user data.
It’s not about “sovereignty” over DNS - it is primarily to prevent dns providers invading user privacy. Go and read the official documentation on ENISA.
Maybe you should have at least a rudimentary understanding of it’s purpose before making uninformed judgements?
It looks more like more political fay dreaming and wishful thinking than an actual solution.
That being said, I am a little disappointed. There's a lot of small wins here. Like not using CloudFlare or Gsuite.
The point is that we need EU services for this and that is ridiculous. The only ones who will benefit from this will be EU companies that might not offer the same quality of service as the US companies do.
There are for example zero hyperscalers in Europe. Sure, I would like to use something EU made, but for all that's normal, offer me something similar to what AWS/Azure/GCP offer.
Should Americans stop using Linux then?
That part is done. Knot Resolver [1] is being developed in Czechia and it is the resolver implementation powering DNS4EU [2].
This particular initiative, while branded as an EU project, appears to be the product of a consortium of private companies, CERTs, and academic partners. In practice, efforts like these often struggle with cohesion, efficiency, and long-term viability—especially when guided by complex bureaucratic processes. It’s difficult to imagine such a model offering a meaningful alternative to existing resolvers, either in terms of privacy, performance, or sovereignty.
I know someone else that writes like that, he is deeply involved in government bureaucracy and they have this complex jargon that I don't know.
a) the sentence structure and overall phraseology being significantly different from the user's prior posts, and
b) the flagrant (ab)use of the em dash.
No one is trying to "localize DNS strictly within national boundaries". Just first first step your computer makes in resolving it.