Re: [dns-privacy] Review of draft-ietf-dprive-rfc7626-bis-03 - Section 3.5.1.1 Comments

[Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>]

On 1/7/2020 12:47 PM, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>
>     To address the more general problem I suggest:
>
>     “Should the trend away from using ISP managed resolvers to using a
>     small set of large public resolvers continue, then an increased
>     proportion of the global DNS resolution traffic will to be served
>     by only a few entities. Some potential impacts of centralisation
>     within the Internet Infrastructure are outlined in
>     [I-D.draft-arkko-arch-infrastructure-centralisation] and include
>     some privacy related considerations.. "
>
>
> Yeah, my point is that I don't agree with this. Right now there is a
> lot of ISP centralization and the move of some of that traffic to
> public resolvers potentially decreases centralization at the margin. I
> certainly don't agree with citing draft-arkko, which is not at all a
> neutral or factual source, so this is just a way of incorporating by
> reference material which doesn't have consensus.


Centralization manifests itself in many ways. EKR is correct that big
ISP do get a huge part of the traffic -- last time I checked, there was
at least one ISP in China and another in India that served pretty much
as many customers as Google DNS. There is also centralization at work
due to outsourcing of the DNS service by ISP. This is a classic
concentration path: an outsourcer that serves many ISP will achieve
economies of scale and may be able to monetize the data flow, making
outsourcing a viable option for the ISP. Experience predicts that
competition between these outsourcers will exhibit "winners take all"
dynamics leading to concentration. As EKR says, the move to third party
resolvers may well counter concentration in the back end of the network.
It could also achieve the opposite, but there are risks on both sides of
this issue. I don't see how we can achieve consensus that one side of
the risk is more dangerous than the other.

-- Christian Huitema