DNS Wars
This is a great history of DNS. I didn’t really notice any inaccuracies. I especially like the way that client subnet was discussed, but of course that’s because I agree with the author.<p>I find it interesting that it avoided DNSSEC, perhaps recognizing it as a skirmish rather than an episode of the greater war. This is probably accurate, DNSSEC has never actively steered DNS in any particular direction, it’s much more passive and therefore doesn’t represent something that needs to be directly fought. Pick your battles, this one is not worth fighting, probably because there’s nothing to gain or lose (from a control perspective) in it succeeding or failing.<p>Tying everything back together with the discussion of Westfalia is really interesting, because it raises an interesting topic. The ability to control the content that users have access to, and the ease of doing so. DoT and DoH make it much harder to <i>easily</i> intercept DNS packets and manipulate or deny responses to them (edit: to be clear it denies network operators this control, but of course the chosen resolver has even more ability to do so). It denies a method of control that network operators have over the users of that network. This control was never perfect, sophisticated (and not even that sophisticated) actors on the network could always circumvent this control of DNS. It really only prevents the majority of people, non-bad actors in general, from circumventing the network operators controls (when considering only DNS as that control mechanism).<p>This is probably a good thing for the user, because it will force the network operators and countries, to start treating good actors and bad actors the same, rather than only controlling and monitoring the unsuspecting normal user, while leaving the doors open for the bad actors. In the Westfalia time period, it would be the difference between the citizen relying on traditional imports vs. the smuggler to avoid all tariffs, because the coasts were large and it was somewhat easy to avoid the navy’s of the large states at the time.