Intellectual Property Law

Geez, Google Wants to Take Over DNS, Too

By Ryan Singel

Google now wants to be your browser’s phone book, launching a DNS service Thursday in hopes that users will let the ad and search giant take over yet another part of their net experience.

Browsers ask Domain Name System (DNS) servers to translate URLs like http://wired.com into the web addresses where the servers are (e.g., http://69.22.138.130). That lets browsers retrieve pages and e-mail clients address e-mails to the right place. Most people simply use the DNS server provided by their ISP, and don’t even know the service exists.

But in recent years, DNS has become competitive with OpenDNS and Neustar offering free and premium services.

OpenDNS in particular has thrived by making their lookups faster, smarter and safer than those from most ISPs, which have little interest in investing in DNS.

But now Google says it’s going to offer its own DNS, which it says will be faster and more secure (See Webmonkey’s Google DNS post to learn the how-to and the whys). While the project isn’t open source, Google says it plans to share what it learns in order to speed up the web around the world. It also says it plans to limit the data it keeps and not show any ads.

OpenDNS, which was first written about here at Threat Level more than three years ago, seems none too happy with Google’s venture, despite a blog post from president David Ulevitch “welcoming” Google to the neighborhood.

It?s not clear that Internet users really want Google to keep control over so much more of their Internet experience than they do already ? from Chrome OS at the bottom of the stack to Google Search at the top, it is becoming an end-to-end infrastructure all run by Google, the largest advertising company in the world. I prefer a heterogeneous Internet with lots of parties collaborating to make this thing work as opposed to an Internet run by one big company.

OpenDNS makes its money by showing search results and ads when a user types in a url that doesn’t exist. Users can also turn on adult-site filtering and make customized shortcuts, features that have helped OpenDNS become wildly successful in gaining paying corporate, educational and individual customers.

It’s not really clear why Google sees the need to run a DNS service. If its intent is to make DNS better all around the world, why isn’t the project open source?

Perhaps Google engineers are trying to take a stand against the increasing number of ISPs, such as Comcast, that are trying to turn their DNS servers into profit machines — often with little thought to security. Comcast is even trying to get the DNS protocol changed to make ads in failed DNS lookups standard across the net.

Maybe this is Google trying to show ISPs how to do it right.

But instead, the news just feels like Google inserting itself into one more layer of the net — just because it can.

Now I can use Google DNS to look up Google.com on my Google Chrome browser running on a Google Chrome OS. And Google DNS will get me to Gmail and Google Books and Google Voice and maybe soon it will even tell my browser where my Google Toothbrush is. And it will do so faster and better than Comcast’s DNS could.

We get it, Google. You are smart. You can do anything better than anyone else (except say social networking and online video). We get it already.

But you are starting to get annoying, and you won’t be running my DNS anytime soon, no matter how nice your privacy promises are.

It’s still called the internet, not the Googlenet.

See Also:

• OpenDNS Wildly Popular After Kaminsky Flaw Disclosure
• OpenDNS Launches Free Porn Filter
• Site-Lookup Service Foils Fraud
• Charter and Earthlink Hijacking Bad Domain Queries
• ISPs’ Error Page Ads Let Hackers Hijack Entire Web, Researcher

Full post as published by Threat Level on December 03, 2009 (boomark / email).