I moved my home network to Google’s recently-announced public DNS. There’s been a lot of talk about Google’s intentions and policies in the time since the announcement, most of which is valid concern. Google has done a pretty good job of addressing the concerns; many of them were even addressed in their privacy policy that was made available at the time of the announcement.
The concerns can, largely, be broken into three categories:
- What does Google log, and how are the logs kept?
- Why didn’t Google point users toward existing projects like OpenDNS?
- Google has control over so much of what I do on the internet. Is it safe for me to give Google control over the protocol which I use to access the internet itself?
Reading over the above-linked privacy policy quickly put at-ease any concerns about logging. Essentially, they only keep personally-identifiable information for 24-48 hours. I’ll accept their reason for keeping them this long as a preventative measure against DDoS attacks, although it seems like DDoS attacks should be detectable well within 24 hours. Their permanent logs don’t include any personally-identifiable info, with the most notable info kept being the requested domain, the clients AS (which is identifiable to an ISP), and geolocation info.
I appreciate that Google is very up-front about what is kept and for how long it’s kept. Everything in their permanent logs seem to be bent toward improving the service speed for users.
I speculate that Google wouldn’t point users toward another service like OpenDNS for two reasons. First, Google thinks they can do it better, and by “better” I mean “faster.” Second, OpenDNS plays some odd redirection and matching games, themselves, and haven’t been shy about criticizing Google ยน.
The third concern was partially addressed by Jason Kottke. Google’s reason for doing this is simply speed. As David Ulevitch, the founder of OpenDNS, points out, “Google claims that this service is better because it has no ads or redirection. But you have to remember they are also the largest advertising and redirection company on the Internet.” The emphasis is mine. He meant this quote to paint Google in a negative light, but with very little effort you can understand how this is actually a perfect explanation for why Google wants to provide good, simple, fast public DNS: the faster the internet is for users, the more ads they can serve.
Google’s transparency with regard to their privacy policy, and their lack of redirection games make the solution very appealing; far more appealing than OpenDNS, and way ahead of my ISP’s DNS (which is known to be god-awful slow). I’ve also done some testing, and I didn’t see any of the OpenDNS things like returning search results if I forget to append the top-level domain to a URL.
Google stands to make a lot more money from providing a fast, clean DNS system to users all over. Google has every reason to benefit from this working, and working well. And it seems to me that we users have very little to lose.