Hacker News Reader

Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

Not everyone has the resources of a Google to acquire lucky IP addresses.

If you have no working DNS, it's hard to google stuff...

There are two types of people - those that just want dns to work at all so they can get stuff done, and those who have working dns but want to 'upgrade' for privacy/filtering reasons.

Well you'd think the EU would have more resources than a single company.

Most of those single digit addresses are in the hands of US corporations. Like 4.4.4.4 is Level 3.

2.0.0.0/16 and 2.2.0.0/16 are owned by Orange, a European company. I'm sure they'd be willing to lease 2.2.2.0/24 and 2.0.0.0/24 for a nominal fee

5.4.0.0/14 (so 5.5.5.5) is Telefonica Germany. Same thing there.

Mercedes owns 53.0.0.0/8 which feels like a nice number for DNS too.

Telefonica and Orange are hardly companies that would just let you lease "valuable" ipv4 addresses without having to pay a hefty sum.

If you only lease something the owner can at any time take your business and efforts from you.

It's not the IP that's the problem.

It's the "anycast" mapping of the IP to geographically and network diverse hosts to connect the user to the "closest" (for some value of latency that stays within the data governance jurisdiction).

To do this, you basically have to own a large enough IP block that backbones will deal with it, and route map it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anycast

This is not "the EU", just an EU NGO offering up the service.

This isn't run by the EU.

This is not something from the EU as the organization, but from a French non-profit.

So in short, they're completely noncredible. I'm not sure who in the right mind would trust a random small company with their DNS.

They're not random, they're a French non-profit (created by cofounders of nextdns, btw). Why wouldn't people trust them? In my country most people use a DNS hosted by their ISP, and there are a lot of small ISPs all around. I suspect it's similar everywhere. How is it different?

And anyway, I trust a random French small company more than I trust Google.

Well yes exactly, the only reason you'd switch to a trusted service over a default is to hopefully shield from DNS poisoning and other shenanigans. It would need to be a proven trustworthy service, and just about anyone with a few hours of spare time and literally no cash can open a French NGO, they've got the lowest barrier for entry of any EU country. Just slapping on a nextdns logo doesn't mean shit. It's completely pointless unless it's an EU official government service financed directly by our tax dollars.

Google has a reputation to uphold, so while you can be certain they'll be datamining the shit out of your requests they are also unlikely to be direct malicious actors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com