For me personally it is much more important to hide my DNS traffic from my ISP instead of Google, etc., even though I don't live in the US.

I pay them to access the internet, every further information they gather about my internet activity does not mean any benefit for me.

Hiding DNS traffic from your ISP is pointless when you have to give them the IP that gets resolved anyway for them to route your traffic.

Not really. Typically the query includes much more information (the site you want to visit) than the response (an IP potentially shared by thousands or millions of sites).

Even with https, the name of the site is sent in clear when the connection to the site is established (this is SNI).

Back when they chose this design for SNI, I’m sure someone argued that it was fine because DNS had already leaked the hostname anyway :)

It's really hard to fix this. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-sni-encrypti... is the state of the art -- note that's a Draft, and really, really not finished, help is doubtless welcome.

If it was easy, it would have been done during the TLS 1.3 process, but after a lot of discussion we're down to basically "Here is what people expect 'SNI encryption' would do for them, here's why all the obvious stuff can't achieve that, and here are some ugly, slow things that could work, now what?"

It is hard because of the TLS's pre-PFS legacy and to some extent also because of (very meaningful) intention to reduce roundtrips. The way to do SNI-like stuff is obvious: negotiate unauthenticated encrypted channel (by means of some EDH variant, you need one roundtrip for that) and perform any endpoint authentication steps inside that channel. This is what SSH2 does and AFAIK Microsoft's implementation of encrypted ISO-on-TCP (eg. rdesktop) does something similar.

Edit: in SSH2 the server authentication happens in the first cryptographic message from server (for the obvious efficiency reasons), and thus for doing SNI-style certificate selection there would have to be some plaintext server-ID in first clients message, but the security of the protocol does not require that as long as the in-tunnel authentication is mutual (it is for things like kerberos).

So, it feels like you're saying this is how SSH2 and rdesktop work, and then you caveat that by saying well, no, they actually don't offer this capability at all it turns out.

You are correct that you can do this if you spend one round trip first to set up the channel, and both the proposals for how we might encrypt SNI in that Draft do pay a round trip. Which is why I said they're slow and ugly. And as you noticed, SSH2 and rdesktop do not, in fact, spend an extra round trip to buy this capability they just go without.

A load balancer can chose the correct backend by using the SNI. So there is a use for being unencrypted.

You're still leaking that information due to SNI.

This does not make sense. Either people are not concerned about hiding their traffic or if they are it follows they would be equally if not much more concerned about Google that can track them across devices and build far more indepth invasive profiles than the ISP.

Aside it's strange https everywhere has been pushed aggressively by many here under the bogeyman of ISP adware and spying while completely ignoring the much larger adware and privacy threats posed by the stalking of Google, Facebook and others. It is disingenuous and insincere.

Most fears of ISPs have been stoked primarily by tech companies, who invest a lot more money into marketing than the ISPs do.

I can only really discuss the UK, since that's the only place where I've bought home ISP service.

Only a handful of small specialist firms actually just move bits in the UK. Every single UK ISP big enough to advertise on television is signed up to filter traffic and block things for being "illegal" or maybe if Hollywood doesn't like them, or if they have "naughty" words mentioned, or just because somebody slipped. If you're thinking "Not mine" and it runs TV adverts then, oops, nope, you're wrong about that and have had your Internet censored without realising it. I wonder how ISPs got their bad reputation...