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Comment by bhaney | Hacker News Reader

Seems both harmless and pointless. There are tons of resolvers that block all sorts of crap, and we just don't use them if we don't want that crap blocked. This proposal doesn't seem to imply that anyone will be forced to use this resolver, and I doubt anyone will use it because it's very unlikely to be better than existing options.

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Not hard to anticipate how this might play out. I can see how it first becomes the "official" resolver, which in a later steps is maybe "recommended," then required if you want certain kinds of funding or subsidy, or just serve public contracts, etc. Before you know it it's mandatory.

They can make it “mandatory” but if it sucks then people will just change their DNS to something else. The people who don’t know how to do that probably don’t leave the mainstream internet anyway.

25 years ago I also had a lot of trust in freedom on the internet, because it would just "route around censorship" and all that. I don't have the same confidence anymore.

The internet seems to be doing just fine at routing around censorship. I can still access TPB and Libgen a multitude of different ways despite the efforts of my govt to block them.

DNS is harder to block because it’s not illegal, and it’s a core internet service, which means there’s a lot of interest in preserving access.

ISPs will block DNS traffic to harmful DNS servers or reroute it to approved servers.

Very difficult to even identify DNS traffic if it’s passing over DoH. EU moves far too slowly to stand a chance at blocking it.

If your evil master plan involves winning against millions of horny teenagers: it’s bad plan.

It's a boiling frog situation, next step in that scenario is making illegal to change the DNS.

You may not use it at home, but it can easily become the default in managed environments.

I just wish that the focus is really on protecting citizens (e.g. block domains known to serve malware) rather than just filtering "illegal content".

The latter would just be a waste of EU money with very little added value for the EU citizens. I'd bet that blocking "illegal content" will be mostly blocking DMCA takedowns. I.e. EU will be spending from their own pockets to have the "privilege" to serve takedowns for US-owned IP from an EU-controlled DNS infrastructure.

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