Serverless DNS: Self-hosted DNS resolver at the edge
I have computers today with enough storage space to hold entire multi-GB public zone files.  The storage capability keeps increasing.  However I only use a small fraction of that data.  In fact, I have computers that can hold the DNS data for every domain name I will ever use in a lifetime.<p>Of that data, a relatively small fraction changes periodically.  Most of it is static.  Generally, I only do remote DNS data retrieval periodically, not immediately preceding each and every HTTP request when accessing a www site.<p>Every user is different but by controlling what RFC 1035 calls the &quot;Master File&quot; of DNS data I can avoid remote DNS lookups altogether.  This speeds up www use for me, greatly.  YMMV.<p>The point that get missed in these discussions, IMHO, is that DNS is not just an issue of speed.^1  (And users can improve speed without help from third parties.)  DNS is also an issue of control.  Controlling DNS allows me as a user to disable the www&#x27;s dark patterns where the user selects a domain name to access and the &quot;browser&quot; connects to various domain names to which the user had no intention of connecting.^2  I can easily thwart unecessary, unwanted phoning home, telemetry, tracking and online advertising because they all rely on using DNS that is, to some degree if not wholly, outside the user&#x27;s control.<p>1.  For example, Google can undoubtedly win the race for DNS speed however the www user will always lose the contest over _control_.<p>2. Originally this auto-fetching feature may not have been intended to support &quot;dark patterns&quot;.  However its usage today is a key element of those practices.  There are companies today whose vision for the www is shaped by a need for programmitic advertising and the privacy invasion that this requires.  They puch for standards and protocols optimised to support &quot;complex&quot; web pages comprised of many components, potentially controlled by various third parties, the most important of which are related to _advertising_.  A www user might have a different vision.  For example, I am able to use the www quite effectively for informtation retrieval (not commerce) without using auto-fetching.^3  I treat www pages as &quot;simple&quot; ones with only one significant component and none controlled by third parties.  This allows me to consume larger quantities of information more rapidly, with less distraction.  &quot;Simple&quot; www pages are more valuable to me than complex ones.  Though they might be less valuable to &quot;tech&quot; companies seeking to sell advertising services.<p>3. Common Crawl, the source for much-hyped &quot;AI&quot; projects such as GPT-3, uses the www in a similar way.  There are no components for &quot;complex&quot; websites such as Javascript files in the archives.