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Comment by drnick1 | Hacker News Reader

> Running a privacy-focused public DNS service is a highly specialized undertaking

This seems like an overstatement: I have been running my own recursive DNS with Unbound for years and never thought it was a "highly specialized undertaking." It took perhaps a couple of hours to set up in the pre-AI age. I filter ads and trackers using an aggressive blacklist[0].

[0] https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists

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You can't compare running a single service in your home network with the operations it takes to serve a public DNS

This is a scaling problem, not an intrinsic difficulty. Mullvad already had the infrastructure in place. I suspect the real reason is cost-cutting.

It's a legal problem (granted, you could still call that both a scaling problem and a cost problem), not a technical nor infrastructural one. That's where Quad9 has specific experience with public hosting that Mullvad doesn't.

I'm sure that the time, effort, money, and exposure that goes into responding and adhering to legal requests for a publicly offered service is something Mullvad wasn't expecting and would rather not be doing considering it's not their core focus.

What is intrinsic difficulty? A product at scale has many intrinsic dimensions, not just technical. Saying scaling is not an intrinsic difficulty is pretty weird given a highly scalable product usually looks nothing like their 1-user counterpart even when they have the same functionality.

>https://freedns.afraid.org/

This dude has been doing it for 25 years, and actually this is a dns provider for domain names which I'm decently sure makes it more complicated than public dns.

They're allowed to say they don't want to pay for it anymore, I just think their logic is bad. Or maybe their lawyer said they're running risks just ignoring takedown and they didn't want to deal with it anymore.

> this is a dns provider for domain names which I'm decently sure makes it more complicated than public dns

Can you expand on this? Isn't all DNS for domain names?

They mean it's authoritative DNS, not a resolver. The two are completely different services. Authoritative DNS is the side that serves the records for your website, resolver is the part that follows the tree of authoritative servers on behalf of the client.

Hey dang can I get my rate limit removed yet?

How much traffic is your public DNS serving?

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