When we add TLS on top of the protocol, ISPs can only filter based on port at that point. We can run DNS on 443 if that helps, but as you said, static well-known IPs can then be blocked.

> I imagine most of the benefit is surely to people who can spin up their own resolvers.

There are already many easily run DNS resolvers available. Is there a benefit you see in operating them over HTTPS that improves on that?

> When we add TLS on top of the protocol, ISPs can only filter based on port at that point.

And SNI… :(

This is really the elephant in the room. For all we know, ISP bad-actors have never cared about DNS for data-collection purposes, and they're already using SNI to gather data to sell to marketers. I think it's absolutely crucial to find a way to (at least optionally) send SNI encrypted to the server.

There's domain fronting, which uses SNI to bypass censorship! :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting

If this were to become an issue, I guess Cloudflare could try to disable SNI.

The client sends SNI, so how could the server opt out?

You just solved your own question. Cloudflare creates an opensource client that users install locally.

The client that sends SNI is, AFAIK, the browser or a similar piece of software. Some older browsers don't support SNI so they can only access single-vhost-per-ip over https.

This means you'll have a really hard time trying to get rid of SNI system-wide, what with a lot of minor apps making their own https connections (granted, on Android or iOS they probably use a common API, but not on a computer).

Where's the button to install your own DNS resolver on iOS? Or non-rooted Android, for that matter.

Someone shared this lovely iOS app yesterday:

DNSCloak • DNSCrypt DoH client by Sergey Smirnov https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/dnscloak-dnscrypt-doh-client...

It supports DNSCrypt, DNSSEC and DNS-over-HTTPS, the IAP are for tips :)

It works via running a VPN server on your device.

To change your normal plaintext DNS resolver just tap the circle-i on your WiFi network.

Well with SNI the concern isn't DNS. Any TLS connection that supports SNI (basically everything that isn't ancient) would have to be fixed. Also, ANI is a pretty useful thing to have and getting rid of it doesn't exactly fix much. Without SNI the server only has the destination IP address to determine which site and thus which certificate to send to the client. Having https sites with multiple certificates hosted on one IP address only works because of SNI. You would break a large portion of the web by disabling it. Also, even if you do disable SNI, the server still sends back the certificate with the domain names in it. And even if you ignore all of that, there's still reverse DNS which will probably be accurate if they send mail from that server and you can always do a DNS lookup for every domain name there is to get a map of which domains point to a given IP. Due to DNS based geolocation that won't work for every site but the sites using that are going to be big enough to find their IP address ranges via another method.

In short, there's really no good solution here but an amendment to TLS could conceivably make it to where it wouldn't be possible to narrow it down to which site that an IP address hosts the user was visiting. That could actually be good enough for traffic to e.g. cloudflare.

Non-rooted android, you have to set a static IP for every network and then there will be an option to enter DNS names. They default to Google DNS Static IP settings are under advanced.

Server could advertise no need to use SNI in advance. Or we could do SNI after actually establishing an encrypted session...

I suppose there is also domain fronting [1], but it won't be fast or an easy-to-remember IP address anymore. And if you need that, you might need a VPN anyway?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting

It's amazing that governments haven't shut down shared domains to prevent domain-frontong.