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Comment by frankietaylr | Hacker News Reader

This centralization is a scary thing especially when all large democracies are looking to make best use of this to monitor their citizens activities most of it to curtail free speech. It will be easy to force two or three multinational corporations to share data or create backdoors than forcing hundreds of smaller corporations which dont do explicit business in those countries.

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In addition, it creates chokeholds in our internet traffic patterns. Should Google or cloudflare decide a site isn’t worthy, they can just remove it from DNS. Google has already done this on numerous occasions.

> Google has already done this on numerous occasions.

Have you got specific examples? I can't recall this happening.

Are you serious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

Some of it I agree with. Hate speech, disinformation, etc. but if google "owns" DNS than it's going to be the same story.

None of those has anything to do with DNS. The correct answer was "No", you don't have any examples of Google "doing this" but only you can link to some other things Google did that you didn't like that and you wouldn't like if it they did this too.

They have everything to do with Google’s track record of bending to requests of governments and entities of interest. To think they wouldn’t do it if they centralized DNS under their umbrella is a farce. No, I don’t have direct evidence of them removing sites from their DNS servers, but there’s plenty of evidence of how they operate the rest of the company.

To take a specific service and say they haven’t is just naive.

If they did do it, why would there not be at least one blog somewhere, of someone noticing that some domain doesn't resolve against 8.8.8.8, but does resolve against some other DNS provider?

Of course, this question would be silly under a dictatorship; the answer would just be "records have been suppressed." But we don't live in a dictatorship. Anyone in the US can use any DNS provider they like, even ones from outside the US. And anyone outside the US can use our DNS providers. So why would there be no evidence?

Mind you, I'm not necessarily arguing that Google wouldn't do this, if they were demanded to do so via a National Security Letter. I'm just arguing that you shouldn't conflate "no evidence that they're not willing to" with "already have in the past."

Google censoring stuff is obviously a big deal and if they'll do it in other avenues they will certainly do it with DNS. Corporations have at least 90% of their goal to maximize profit, and that is made much easier when you centralize everything to your servers, your control, and your specifications.

A bigger issue is IANA. The way that IP addresses are managed and controlled is really disadvantageous for smaller entities. The organisation itself should be moved to Switzerland as a start.

If you're thinking about IPv4 then I'm afraid that ship has long sailed. IANA exhaustion occurred in 2011, there aren't any IPv4 addresses left to be assigned by IANA. If your region did a poor job of allocating its blocks, take that up with them, it's not IANA's fault.

For IPv6 there is plenty of space and if you have a real use for more than a /48 then you can write up the paperwork for why you need so much space and get it approved, you don't need IANA, whether in Switzerland or anywhere else.

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