“The DNS may be a privacy risk, but your privacy gets violated in so much more effective ways by all of this web stuff. … Most people don't realize that when an ad gets populated on their web page, 150 or more organizations have been asked, do you want to serve this ad to this person? They don't identify the person, but they can identify up to 144 characteristics of the person. So I appreciate the people who have done some stuff about DNS privacy, but your privacy is long gone by the time you worry about this.”
The Developing Dev · Software Engineering & Infra · October 2026
Mockapetris, who designed the Domain Name System, was asked who pays for the internet's root servers. He notes that DNS is becoming more centralized in a few large providers, then argues that DNS privacy worries miss the much bigger leak in online advertising.
Transcript
You know, you at a 286 laptop could have mined a few billion dollars worth of Bitcoin without much trouble, right?
…lines of code. Check them out at workOS.com to learn more and get started. And I appreciate them for sponsoring my show. You mentioned those root servers that we go to initially. What's the economic and who's paying for those servers? What's the economic incentive for those 13 clouds that exist?
…in the internet. Now, it's really, in a way, kind of silly because given the way that ad networks and big websites operate, the DNS may be a privacy risk, but your privacy gets violated in so much more effective ways by all of this web stuff. You know, it's like it doesn't make it to the metal round of privacy invasion. I mean, you know, you take a look at the way ad networks work. You know, most people don't realize that when an ad gets populated on their web page, 150 or more organizations have been asked, do you want to serve this ad to this person? They don't identify the person, but they can identify up to 144 characteristics of the person. So I appreciate the people who have done some stuff about DNS privacy, but your privacy is long gone by the time you worry about this.
I mean, if you're running a big cloud service to do DNS at a hyperscaler like Amazon or something like that, that's going to cost a good amount of money. So I would think there's something more than prestige as an incentive.
Well, sure. I mean, I can suggest a couple of things, one of which is that Microsoft, for example, knows how the performance of LinkedIn affects how much money they make. Basically, the faster it works, the more money they make. So they want to give you a good response time. All right. So there are…
When I was reading about, I guess, some of the history of this work, there's all these RFCs. And my high-level understanding is that's a name for an engineering proposal. But I'm curious to know what's the culture behind an RFC.
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