Cloudflare and NextDNS absolutely counts as "some random company" in this context. I have no reason to trust random American companies more than my local ISP. I don't trust the USA more than I trust my own country.

> I have no reason to trust random American companies more than my local ISP. I don't trust the USA more than I trust my own country.

You know you are quite fortunate to be able to say so.

Firefox is a project with global impact. A lot of people around the world can benefit from DoH.

Even people in Germany who want to read the other side of the war story, like I did yesterday to read RT(.com) vs the Tagesschau propaganda. Since my ISP, O2, has removed rt.com entries and other russian propaganda outlets (I acknowledge the "west" also has propaganda outlets like Reuters etc) I was looking for ways to still read rt.com news. I looked into Firefox' preferences and searched for "DNS" and saw DNS over HTTP and I could pick Cloudflare, NextDNS (never heard of) or custom. I picked Cloudflare and read rt.com thus getting the other side of the whole bs propaganda mess.

The German Grundgesetz (constitution) says "eine Zensur findet nicht statt" (censorship does not occur/there will be no censorship) yet, there is censorship.

I was sceptical about DOH in general (why do we need this?) but now I see why this can be a good thing and great as well that Firefox supports it so easily.

Referring to Reuters as a propaganda outlet seems like a bold statement; what evidence led you to make that claim?

I could turn the question around, what evidence do you have they aren't?

I'm not going to search for every single article. Or are you seriously suggesting that Reuters is 100% free of propaganda, especially in war times?

The answer your question: "common sense".

> I could turn the question around, what evidence do you have they aren't?

I don't care about either side of this argument, but you can't logically turn the question around. The burden of proof is on you, who made the claim.

That is an unsatisfying and fallacious response. I did not make that claim, nor did I call them a propaganda outlet. For whom are they propagandizing?

How is this different from just using different DNS settings on your OS?

Because your ISP can block a "raw" DNS request, regardless of what server you configure. Your ISP can even inspect your DNS request, and choose to give a fake response or block the request based on the domain you are requesting.

Your ISP can also block the IP via reverse DNS if they want too.. If you don’t trust your ISP only a vpn will save you

Because USA wouldn't issue a national security letter to get dirt on foreigners? Seems like if Mozilla wanted to choose DoH as way to protect people from being spied on they wouldn't choose USA-based companies?

Like "don't get caught by your own gov accessing restricted material get caught by USA gov-related organisations so they can sell you out to your own gov & benefit USA".

If you're bothered about who's watching your web traffic then it seems highly unlikely you want to add USA to the list of who is watching you??

There aren't many companies with that capability and scale outside of US.

And the States are watching you anyway: most of the Internet resides there. Even the websites that don't are likely using Cloudflare or etc to save on traffic.

Cloudflare is only the default for users in the USA.

I'm in Canada and the default provider is CIRA. I can also choose to switch to Cloudflare, NextDNS, or add my own.

You can check out the Network Settings at the bottom of the General tab to see what your default is.

And who on earth is NextDNS? Looking at their website, there's no mailing address, phone number, or other identifying information other than the names of the founders and their Twitter links. If that doesn't qualify as some random company, I'm not sure what does!

And I simply don't trust Cloudflare.

And that’s fair, again this is all completely customizable and in fact you are better served configuring a system/network-wide DNS host that you run yourself or trust.

Most people are going to use the defaults. Giving all DNS requests for 99.9% of Firefox users to two random American companies is irresponsible.

If it is irresponsible to utilize the services provided by companies under the jurisdiction of the United States, then using much of the internet and Firefox itself is irresponsible.

The user made a conscious choice to trust one specific American company. They do not want other companies they did not personally "vet"-- with whatever weird and personal criteria they feel like -- added without their approval. This shouldn't be this hard to understand.

And they have the option to not utilize this feature or change the settings to a service provider they do trust.

The threat vector is understandable. Not making the choice to mitigate it is what does not make sense to me. Cloudflare is not an unknown operator. You can study their past behavior, their beliefs, and how their services work, and make that choice.

Saying 99% of people accept the defaults and claiming this is bad without learning about what the defaults are or how to change them when it takes a few straightforward steps to do so is what does not make sense to me.

Even installing Firefox in the first place is to make a conscious choice to change the defaults of nearly all operating systems that the vast majority of people on Earth use. It’s defaults will also now have a feature to encrypt your DNS queries to a third party vetted by Firefox. If you cannot trust them then why use their browser?

I’ve studied it.

“Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s chief executive. “It’s dangerous for infrastructure companies to be making what are editorial decisions,” he said.”

Not dangerous enough apparently.

So? That's not an argument for doing it again. 'Everyone else is taking a bung from the NSA to forward them data', for example, isn't a moral justification to do it yourself (made up example).

You get prompted for whether or not you want to use it. If you choose not to use it, it will continue using whatever DNS your computer is using.

It's just an option. In this case, both selected options are excellent providers that I'm happy to see.