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Predictions for DNS 2010
This morning Google announced the launch of Google DNS. Most of the early posts I read didn’t mention that this is a great way for Google to know EVERYTHING that you do online. Back in 2007, James Thomas attempted to use the Web without ever touching a Google service. He was able to do it for a short bit but eventually gave in. In late 2007, I took a look at just how much Google knew about you. Last year I updated the post to note that Google even knows where I am.
What Google DNS will do is basically sit between your computer and the computer you want to reach. When we type in “moo.com”, a computer has to translate that to computer-speak and then send us on our way to the computer that holds the moo.com files. This middle-man computer is called a DNS 0r domain name server.
Google says they can do DNS faster than anyone else and that since we all want to load webpages very fast, people will want to switch.
Jesse Stay says that DNS will become the new browser war and compares today’s announcement to the fight between Netscape and Microsoft. Steve Rubel says that the Google DNS is all about ads. You might be wondering why Steve says that this is an ad-play. It’s simple. Using my example above with moo.com, let’s say you accidentally type in “moopiet29595.com”. Since there is no website at that address, the DNS server is lost out there in cyberspace. When that happens, most DNS servers will reroute you to a page that typically is a search page with search results that match the name you typed in plus ads.
OpenDNS, the popular DNS service, has a post that discusses the Google DNS launch. It’s worth a read.
Based on today’s announcement, here are my top two predictions for 2010 with regards to DNS.
Google Will Own ISP DNS
It’s simple – most Internet providers will outsource their DNS functions to Google. I predict that this will happen by the end of June 2010. Google has the cash and will make it super sweet for the ISPs to switch. This will also help Google take the main market share for DNS. Changing your DNS servers on your computer is not that easy and most Internet users will never do it. But if Google partners with say Comcast or Time Warner, they can make the change at the server level and it will be done automatically. The ISPs get major cash, Google gets the overwhelming share of the DNS function and users never know anything changed.
For years I thought Google would acquire the big ISPs. Now they have no need to – just take over the DNS and they get control without having to deal with the other ISP operations (e.g. billing, customer service, etc.)
Microsoft Will Acquire OpenDNS
If we go with Jesse’s argument above that DNS will be the warzone for position next year, Microsoft will want a hand in the pot. OpenDNS won’t be able to resist the bucket of cash that Microsoft will bring. At that point, Microsoft will go after the partnerships I noted above that Google will most likely make. And Jesse will be right – it will be a bloodbath.
I can’t tell you whether to switch to Google DNS or not. The bottom line is that Google knows just about everything you do online already. So much so that in the promo for a show tonight on CNBC where Maria Bartiromo will interview Google employees, the only promo they are airing features Maria saying “just how much does Google know about me?”
Is today’s announcement a bad thing — I can’t answer that question but my guess is that once the government gets past the health care issues, they may just come knocking. Google has nothing to worry about for now though because the health care debate will take us into 2014. I’d love to get a reaction from the President’s CTO and tech team.
If you decide to setup Google DNS, Amit has a great post with videos on how to make the switch. And if you decide to switch, leave a comment with your reasoning for switching.
The United States Gov. is killin’ me. Doesn’t the whole population see that health care “reform” absolutely will increase taxes for everybody and even invent new ones for all of us?
Looks like Google is attracting users on quite nice Private Policy too. http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html
>>>
Google Public DNS stores two sets of logs: temporary and permanent. The temporary logs store the full IP address of the machine you’re using. We have to do this so that we can spot potentially bad things like DDoS attacks and so we can fix problems, such as particular domains not showing up for specific users.
We delete these temporary logs within 24 to 48 hours.
In the permanent logs, we don’t keep personally identifiable information or IP information. We do keep some location information (at the city/metro level) so that we can conduct debugging, analyze abuse phenomena and improve the Google Public DNS prefetching feature. We don’t correlate or combine your information from these logs with any other log data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network. After keeping this data for two weeks, we randomly sample a small subset for permanent storage.
>>>
Anyway, I can see a difference in speed here in Middle Europe :)
As an ISP, I see ZERO chance of an ISP outsourcing DNS to Google. Zero.
I’m curious if you would have said the same thing about Web hosts outsourcing e-mail servers to Google five years ago.
good question…
[...] Allen on the other hand thinks this the first step in becoming the de facto global DNS service provider It’s simple – most Internet providers will outsource their DNS functions to Google. I predict that this will happen by the end of June 2010. Google has the cash and will make it super sweet for the ISPs to switch. This will also help Google take the main market share for DNS. Changing your DNS servers on your computer is not that easy and most Internet users will never do it. But if Google partners with say Comcast or Time Warner, they can make the change at the server level and it will be done automatically. The ISPs get major cash, Google gets the overwhelming share of the DNS function and users never know anything changed. [...]
I see we are on the same line.
Here is my take on Google’s service offering.
http://michaeljung.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/quick-raw-dirty-my-take-on-googles-dns-service-offering/
I have a paid OpenDNS account, and I have a personal conflict of interest with Google.
With those caveats:
– I’m finding OpenDNS to be twice as fast on average as the Google DNS service. This is just simple testing running ‘dig @8.8.8.8 http://www.somedomainname.com‘ in a loop for awhile, and extracting the query times. OpenDNS is very consistently 10-12ms with outliers up to 18ms. Google was consistently 24-28ms with a few sub 20ms, but many results over 30ms. Now, this wasn’t scientific, I don’t know if the name was cached or not, but that should be irrelevant after the first query up to the TTL for the domain.
– OpenDNS’ response left out the single biggest reason NOT to use OpenDNS: by default they proxy all requests for google.com through their own service. That means that today OpenDNS does what they claim Google could potentially do in the future. The proxy is easy to turn off if you pay attention, but you need to create an account and you can only turn it off on an IP address or network basis. If you move around a lot and use various wifi hotspots but hardcode OpenDNS’ servers, you’re going to get their proxy of google.com (you can mitigate this a bit by setting up your own /etc/hosts file but then you lose whatever load and geographic balancing google.com does)
I’m sticking with OpenDNS for now, but honestly if they were to be bought by MSFT I’ll drop them faster than a bad SYN-ACK packet.
Hypothetically, were Google to use this data, how would it be useful?
– IP addresses are frequently shared. So while you can definitely tie a lookup to an IP address, that isn’t necessarily an individual. And it could well be another nameserver forwarding a request.
– They could feed the data into the adwords exchange. But the speed at which responses are generated would mean for much faster auctions than they perform today. The data would be more useful as a trend to influence auctions, but would the few seconds in time between the lookup and a potential page rendering of adsense ads really provide much benefit? Is there such a thing as high-speed trading in the ad network world?
– If they were nefarious, they could resolve rival ad networks to their own service to intercept the ads. This would last all of, what, an hour? before an injunction was filed, probably by the same ISPs who do some comparable things today.
– If they were nefarious they could use the data to determine what sites people were going to which DON’T have adsense, and somehow use that to their advantage. But, they have an index (in theory) of the entire public web, so they should have this information already.
– From a network engineering perspective it could give them even more insight into the topology of the Internet than they have today since DNS is typically served over UDP and not TCP. I don’t know what that insight would be or how it would be different from the reams of data they collect from serving ads and Youtube already.
The one benefit that makes sense to me at the moment is that, as naïve as it sounds, it helps speed up web pages, even by a few tenths of a second. We know Google obsesses about millisecond differences in search results resulting in million dollar shifts of revenue. If they could apply that sort of optimization to the web as a whole for what’s got to be a drop in the capital expense bucket for them to provide this service, why not?
[...] goes even further with a prediction that ISP’s will use Google’s service to save costs. Which inevitably makes the opt-out [...]
Hey ISP’s like Comcast, RR and Time Warner already re-route you to a branded search page when the link or item you plugged in isn’t found so google doing the same wouldn’t be that big a leap and honestly would be noticeable to the average user.
The only real issue I’m having is how much of what I do is Google controlled. 99.9% of my searches are through Google, now 100% off my traffic will also be sent through them..that’s a bit scary if you think about the level of control they “could” exert.
I switched .. why wouldn’t I … I mean .. hey, it’s Google right?
Well I didn’t fully switch, I still route through a local DNS for our development studio .. but that’s for internal domains anyway :D
Do I notice a difference – nah not really
> “When that happens, most DNS servers will reroute you to a page that typically is a search page with search results that match the name you typed in plus ads.”
Which Google have specifically said they won’t do with Google DNS.
game over when prediction #1 is done.