This is hilarious. The UK government and a UK ISP trade group are wetting their pants because Google and Mozilla are planning to implement a more secure, privacy respecting DNS lookup in their browsers. They’ve even declared Google and Mozilla to be “Internet Villains” for having the temerity to respect the safety and privacy of their users. They give all sorts of specious reasons for their opposition to the change—including the usual shameless “protect the children” cant always favored by scoundrels trying to put something over on the rest of us—but it boils down to “we won’t be able to spy on you and control what you see anymore.”
Of course, even that’s not true. It probably is true that it will be slightly harder to filter out “undesirable” sites but at the end of the day, the final IP address must be visible to transport the traffic. Yes, sites deemed undesirable can change their IP addresses often in an effort to stay ahead of the blue noses but those addresses must be available to everyone to be useful so they can still be blocked.
I consider this change an unmitigated good thing and hope that Google and Mozilla will stand their ground but I’m not sanguine. The problem is that both organizations have a history of being hostile to those they consider guilty of BadThink and may come to agree with the censors.
I hope that doesn’t happen. It’s not, after all, up to the rest of us to make it easy for the GCHQ to spy on ordinary citizens just in case they may harbor impure thoughts of a social or political nature. Nor should our safety and privacy be degraded so ISPs can redirect bad DNS requests to their own page offering the erroneously requested domain for sale.