Google Enters Free DNS Fray

Now it seems that OpenDNS has some serious competition: Google announced their Google Public DNS service just days ago. The founder of OpenDNS, Dave Ulevitch, responded to Google’s announcement in his blog.

Several things stand out between OpenDNS and Google DNS:

• Google DNS does not misuse NXDOMAIN responses. That is, when you try to resolve an entry that does not exist, you get a “no domain found” response: OpenDNS sends you to their search page.
• Google DNS supports IPv6.
• Google DNS implements a wide array of security tools to mitigate attacks against DNS servers.
• Google will (probably) not redirect valid DNS entries to its own servers.

There has already been some speed testing that shows that, at least in India, the response from Google DNS is much faster than OpenDNS.

CNET had a nice write-up (in the DeepTech blog by Stephen Shankland) on Google’s DNS offering and what it means.

It also appears that the privacy concerns that have cropped up with OpenDNS may not be a concern with Google’s Public DNS (and ironically so). Over at the Slight Paranoia blog by Christopher Soghoian, he wrote a piece about their privacy policy – and received a nice response directly from Dave Ulevitch (the founder of OpenDNS).

Over at The Scream!, there is a forum posting that describes some of this in detail – including the redirection of google.com to google.navigation.opendns.com. The Wikipedia entry on OpenDNS also addresses some of these issues, none of which appear to exist in Google’s Public DNS.