differentiated dns

David Jacobs points to OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch's post on Google DNS. (Thanks, David!) The graf that DJ pulled is interesting, but so is this one:

It means that Google is bringing awareness to a wide audience that there is a choice when it comes to DNS and that users don’t have to settle for what their ISP provides. And we believe that having choice is a good thing — just as Internet users have unbundled their email to services like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail people have been unbundling their DNS and switching to OpenDNS in huge numbers for the last 3+ years because we’re better.

This is absolutely the case. I'd never even considered switching my DNS service on my laptop or home machines until today. And now I'll probably try Google and/or OpenDNS. But users abandoned their ISP-provided email to the webmail services because of a radically better user experience, and I'm not sure that a DNS service provides that much opportunity for differentiation to even the mildly sophisticated Internet user (i.e. "one that even knows what DNS is").

Comments

[Paul Morriss]

The thing I like about OpenDNS is the basic filtering it offers.