The list is not so much interesting for the options that it presents, as far as I am concerned, but for the things that it reveals. Every single entry that is explicitly marked 'China' also has 'operates under Chinese regulations'; which is, in 2026, something that is of concern for more than just the Chinese entries on the list, to people on my continent for starters.

'Run by one individual in Denmark.' is an interesting statement of bus factor, but I don't think that all of the other entries should be assumed to be better just because they are mute on the point. There's far less information about who is behind DNS.Watch than there is about Thomas Steen Rasmussen. And it appears that DNS.Watch went off the air at least once in recent years, so it is a legitimate concern.

Then there are all sorts of things not on this list that might matter to people, such as Quad101 looking like it has geographic restrictions on whom it is available to and Gcore being an AI company.

Many public wifi network works need you to use their DNS, so they can redirect you to a gated "accept ToS" screen (and may even require re-approval every 30-60 minutes).

To resolve the issue is so frustrating:

1. realize the internet stopped working 2. ping google.com, wait for timeouts to show up. 3. try to guess if its a ISP issue, but then realize the wifi probably timed out. 4. Switch the dns. Flush DNS. 5. try to access a non-TLS domain 6. approve the gate 7. switch the DNS back

There has to be something that manages this

I pre-cache all the domains I use hourly via cron. My ISP is not going to dork with my DNS requests and their employees are bigger deviants than I. If I ever started browsing the web from a phone I would just set up my own public DoH server. It only takes a few minutes and gives me my own query logs for debugging weird issues.

[1] - https://tls-ech.dev/

ISP: 1ms to Cloudflare

Cloudflare: 10ms to Cloudflare

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Edit: will clarify, this advice applies to countries with good privacy laws and no national surveillance i.e. not the USA

Plus it’s reliable and fast from basically anywhere (which is harder to achieve if I ran my own resolvers in the cloud, and anyway I don’t want to have to maintain that).

https://download.dnscrypt.info/dnscrypt-resolvers/v3/public-...

Is the author suggesting this represents the actual number of open resolvers on today's internet

How can any consideration of "privacy" or "security" of DNS not also consider SNI

SNI allows third parties to see when the user tries to connect to an address published for a domain name. It can allow third parties to interfere with such connections

DNS only allows third parties to see when a user looks up an address published for a domain name. To associate non-DNS traffic with these queries requires assumptions about the software that is sending them

Hence it is not surprising the advertising companies that control the popular web browsers want users to choose DoH _within the browser_ or corporate OS, deceptively labeled as "private DNS"^1, so these third parties can more effectively correlate these queries with non-DNS traffic from browsers or software running on corporate OS

1. Perhaps these companies will be sued for these deceptive claims. For example, users have successfully sued for deceptive claims about "private browsing"

https://www.cira.ca/en/canadian-shield/configure/summary-cir...

Imagine seeing response times at P90 for a series of random lookups and comparing the median response times.

I run my own Unbound recursive DNS, it only talks with the 13 root nameservers and has its own caching, the subsequent requests are lightning fast.

It is for local use only, it is not exposed to the public. When I leave home, I have a WireGuard VPN at home so my phone connects to it and the full traffic is sent via my home network.

Everything works flawlessly for the past 5 years or so.

Some like cloudflare doesn’t support that in the name of privacy.

EDNS lets the dns server of the site you are visiting know from where you are connecting and can give you the closest server. 1.1.1.1 does not do that. This breaks all sorts of ISP cache and peering arrangements.

Here’s an example: My ISP’s google global cache is broken every time I use cloudflare. With google dns, opendns, isp’s own dns I get my ISP’s own ip address for the domain “googlevideo.com” which is where youtube videos load from. With cloudflare dns I get an ip address of an actual google server which may or may not be in my country. Result: my downloads from google drive/youtube/play store all are faster with a dns server with proper EDNS support.

Now imagine this on a global scale for smaller websites, your request might go to a different continent.

I understand the product decision for cloudflare and I don’t want them to change but this is something people should know about. There are numerous reports on their forums which are always locked with no activity.

I am not saying it’s a conspiracy but this doesn’t affect sites on cloudflare btw due to their global anycast routing/infra setup which I don’t know enough to explain.

It would need to be built into iOS/Android/Linux/Windows/MacOS but what would be the disadvantages?

I can see greater load on root servers but caching is specifically designed to reduce that.

I can see potential problems for CDNs and equivalent geo-based resolvers.

But are they really that bad?

If it is this hard to choose a resolver, imagine how hard it is to choose a web browser, which is a choice that actually matters.

The nearest resolver is

  $ sudo apt-get install unbound

Even if it's configuring something for boomer family, that sounds like a recipe for "why is this website not working"?

note on privacy: if you are using port 53 you are cooked so make sure you are using dns-over-tls or dns-over-https.