My Chromecast Ultra would not start until I began answering 8.8.8.8
I&#x27;m always shocked at how easy it is for people to fall into the &quot;Google is evil!!1&quot; trap on such trivial stuff (and funnily enough, much more serious privacy issues related to Google are ignored&#x2F;downvoted).<p>Hardcoded DNS servers are common. <i>Extremely</i> common in a bunch of IOT devices, given how broken some ISPs are. This is a non-story and the only reason it&#x27;s being upvoted is because Google is doing it, and they also control the DNS server.<p>You know what <i>would</i> be an actual story though? If Google used Google DNS to spy on people. If anyone has concrete evidence that they&#x27;re doing that, <i>that</i> is a big fucking deal. Not some email about a google-complaint-of-the-week.<p>Edit: To be clear I&#x27;d agree that in a high quality product there needs to be a way to change the DNS servers. Then again, this is a $30 device to hook up TVs, and I&#x27;ve seen $200 routers lacking that ability.<p>----<p>Edit 2, elaborating on the above: You make a cheap device that will likely end up in millions of homes and your #1 support issue is &quot;It doesn&#x27;t work [because my ISP is terrible therefore my network configuration is shit]!&quot;. What do you do? Do you tell your consumers to suck it up and talk to their ISP? Or do you… hardcode a DNS server that you at least know will work?<p>&quot;Issues&quot; like this one are non-issues and distract from the myriad of very real privacy issues coming out of Google. Yes, this <i>should</i> be configurable at the very least… then again, Google products aren&#x27;t exactly known for their wonderful configurability.