Curious Cloudflare DNS behavior

Sat May 30 19:17:43 UTC 2020

On Sat, May 30, 2020 at 01:52:58PM -0500, Constantine A. Murenin wrote:
> When you're not paying for service, you're not the customer, you're the
> product.

A pleasantly misleading statement.  Most easily observed in that there are
many cases where there is multiple monetization.  You may be your broadband
provider's customer, but it's likely they're still selling you in other
ways.  On the flip side, some of us provide free services with no ulterior
motive.  Go figure.

> I don't understand why anyone, especially anyone frequenting NANOG, would
> use Cloudflare for their DNS.

The early '90's called and said you're missing (don't worry, they said
it about me too).  :-)  ;-)

The Internet didn't evolve in the way its designers expected.  Early 
mistakes and errors required terrible remediation.  As an example, look
at the difficulty involved in running a service like e-mail or DNS.
E-mail requires all sorts of things to interoperate well, including SPF,
DKIM, SSL, DNSBL's, etc., etc., and it is a complicated service to run
self-hosted.  DNS is only somewhat better, with the complexity of DNSSEC
and other recent developments making for more difficulties in maintaining
self-hosted services.

Some people want basic services that "just work" without having to put
any effort into them.  That isn't limited to non-technical users.

Outsourcing stuff like DNS is just a continuation of the trend of sending
your workloads onto someone else's cloud.  It seems easy -- right up until
it isn't working the way you want it to.

But for most people, even those frequenting NANOG, maybe they just don't
want to go set up their own recursion nameservice.  I'm not saying I
agree with that strategy, but at least it's understandable.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way
through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that
democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"-Asimov