- Public DNS services have traditionally offered Internet users in certain parts of the world better performance and greater privacy and accessibility.
- Since 2022, the use of public DNS services has halved in many regions.
- Study seeking to learn reasons for this drop in usage and global regulatory tracker of government requests to block domain name resolution.
The Domain Name System (DNS) and its resolvers are critical parts of Internet infrastructure that translate domain names into IP addresses. Despite their importance, they are often overlooked in policy and governance studies. This oversight can lead to policies that inadvertently undermine their performance, disrupting access to online services and potentially leading to their extreme centralization.
Digital Medusa is investigating global DNS usage trends, including centralizing DNS resolver services. While the research is ongoing, we have published a preliminary report to receive feedback on reasons for DNS resolver usage trends, the use of open-source software for DNS resolvers, and the creation of a global regulatory DNS blocking tracker.
Public DNS Resolver Usage Has Halved
One of the central questions driving this research is to learn why there are so few trusted public DNS resolvers.
DNS resolvers were traditionally run by Internet users’ local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) until several large ISPs, DNS service providers, and content delivery networks established regional and global resolvers. These resolvers offered Internet users in certain parts of the world better performance and greater privacy and accessibility.
The former of these benefits was not lost on ISPs, with many redirecting their customers to these large-scale resolvers, reducing their need to maintain their own resolver. By 2022, around 1 in 5 DNS queries globally were served by several ‘public’ DNS resolvers run by content service providers, including Google (8.8.8.8) and Cloudflare (1.1.1.1).
However, in 2024, this figure has fallen to less than 1 in 10 globally, with all but one region (Micronesia) recording significant decreases in its usage.
Our preliminary analysis shows a sharp decline in the use of public DNS resolvers globally. A hypothesis for this drop is an increase in regulatory pressures and content moderation requirements by the governments. While such requests might not directly order domain name blocking at the DNS resolver level, ISPs might find it easier and less costly to follow the blocking order through the DNS resolver.
Of note, we identified a high percentage of Internet users in regions with low Internet and Press freedoms, including Central Asia and Middle and West Africa, still using public DNS resolvers.
In light of the increasingly complex regulatory frameworks DNS providers face, we have also started building a global regulatory tracker that monitors governments’ requests to block domain name resolution by public DNS resolvers.
We welcome your feedback on the report, the global blocking tracker, and other important focus areas.
This work is funded by the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund Initiative with significant technical and data engineering assistance from Sebastian Castro at .IE.
Contributors: Sebastian Castro, .IE
Farzaneh Badiei is a recovering academic and founded Digital Medusa to petrify the enemies of a global, interoperable Internet.
The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Internet Society.