This was quite annoying for me, having only switched my DNS server to 1.1.1.1 approximately 3 weeks ago to get around my ISP having a DNS outage. Is reasonably stable DNS really so much to ask for these days?
Like mentioned by other comments, do it on your own if you are not happy with the stability. Or just pay someone to provide it - like your ISP..
And TBH I trust my local ISP more than Google or CF. Not in availability, but it's covered by my local legislature. That's a huge difference - in a positive way.
I don't think this is fair when discussing infrastructure. It's reasonable to complain about potholes, undrinkable tap water, long lines at the DMV, cracked (or nonexistent) sidewalks, etc. The internet is infrastructure and DNS resolution is a critical part of it. That it hasn't been nationalized doesn't change the fact that it's infrastructure (and access absolutely should be free) and therefore everyone should feel free to complain about it not working correctly.
"But you pay taxes for drinkable tap water," yes, and we paid taxes to make the internet work too. For some reason, some governments like the USA feel it to be a good idea to add a middle man to spend that tax money on, but, fine, we'll complain about the middle man then as well.
DNS is infrastructure. But "Cloudflare Public Free DNS Resolver" is not, it's just a convenience and a product to collect data.
(This isn't a major concern, of course; and I mention it just to extend your argument yet further. The major gain of a private root content DNS server is the fraction of really stupid nonsense DNS traffic that comes about because of various things gets filtered out either on-machine or at least without crossing a border router. The gains are in security and privacy more than uptime.)
But opposite to tap water there are a lot of different free DNS resolvers that can be used.
And I don't see how my taxes funded CFs DNS service. But my ISP fee covers their DNS resolving setup. That's the reason why I wrote
> a service that's free of charge
Which CF is.
>"But you pay taxes for drinkable tap water," yes, and we paid taxes to make the internet work too. For some reason, some governments like the USA feel it to be a good idea to add a middle man to spend that tax money on, but, fine, we'll complain about the middle man then as well.
You don't want DNS to be nationalized. Even the US would have half the internet banned by now.
which might not be a good thing in some jurisdictions - see the porn block in the UK (it's done via dns iirc, and trivially bypassed with a third party dns like cloudflare's).
So far I'm lucky and the only ban I'm aware of is on gambling. Which is fine for me personally.
But in a UK case I'd using a non local one as well.
I did this for a while, but ~300ms hangs on every DNS resolution sure do get old fast.
With something like a N100- or N150-based single board computer (perhaps around $200) running any number of open source DNS resolvers, I would expect you can average around 30 ms for cold lookups and <1 ms for cache hits.
Even if a root server wasn't in the US, it will still be pretty slow for me. Europe is far worse. Most of Asia has bad paths to me, except for Japan and Singapore which are marginally better than the US. Maybe Aus has one...?
Incompetent admins. dnsmasq at least has an option to override it (--min-cache-ttl=<time>)
Edit: How to serve the root zone locally with unbound. https://old.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/s43o8j/where_does_u...
[0] dig axfr . @k.root-servers.net
[0]: https://root-servers.org/ [1]: https://github.com/jschauma/tld-zoneinfo
When DNS resolver is down, it affects everything, 100% uptime is a fair expectation, hence redundancy. Looks like both 1.0.0.1 and 1.1.1.1 were down for more than 1h, pretty bad TBH, especially when you advise global usage.
RCA is not detailed and feels like a marketing stunt we are now getting every other week.
Your own "anecdata" shows how catastrophic DNS failures are and why it's justified to expect 100% uptime with proper redundancy. Too bad you had providers not architecturing properly this key part of their infrastructure to the point you had to build your own solution.