Google has decided to get into the DNS business. Well, more specifically it has decided to get into the DNS resolution business. To most people DNS is some arbitrary networking term that they may have heard used once or twice when they were setting up their high speed internet accounts, or maybe not at all.
In the case of the internet, all of the computers directly connected to it are assigned a number (IP Address). And they communicate with each other via these numerical addresses. But it would be really difficult for a human to remember to type in 192.168.1.1 to go to Google.com for example. Instead we memorize common language names like "google.com". So there needed to be a system out there that would allow us humans to use common language, but translate those requests into numerical addresses that machines can deal with easier. That is what DNS does. If you type in google.com your computer *first* goes to a DNS server which responds to your computer with "google.com = 192.168.1.1" and *then* your computer actually goes to that numerical address.
So, why would Google want to start running a menial DNS server service? And what makes it a big deal?
- Today, it means nothing. It's free and fast to you but with little benefit to Google....yet
- However, you'll notice in my example above that the *first* place your computer went was the DNS server, not the actual destination you wanted to go to. By being in the middle of all those transactions Google can now determine ways to insert itself (or "assert" itself as the case may be)...and there are lots of ways indeed.
- They can offer you a little assistance if they like when you type in a invalid domain name. By giving you a suggestion as to what you might have meant to type in. While showing you an advertisement of course
- They can offer filtering services such as providing filters to restrict your childrens computer to only certain types of websites
- They can offer business filters for employee monitoring/restrictions and provide reporting on your employees visitation habits
- They can highlight sponsored sites to you when you when you type in a bad address that are relevant to what you meant to type
- They can utilize the data they are gathering to provide general behavioural analytics to marketing companies (no identifying personal data of course)
- The list goes on
The point, is that once you put Google in the middle of every web transaction you partake in there is a lot of opportunity for Google to monetize that traffic. That's not necessarily a bad thing by the way. If the benefits they can come up with outweigh their intrusions then what do I care? I'm not a paranoid fear mongerer, so no conspiracy theories will be forthcoming from me.
And by the way, it's very likely that you are *already* in this exact situation. Charter, and many other ISP's regularly setup their DNS servers, that by default you are using, to intercept bad address entries and make suggestions to you. I just don't expect that they'll figure out how to monetize it as well as Google will.
If you want to give it a shot you can find instructions for doing so here:
Matt Ridings - @techguerilla
