You might have an ISP where they have professional DNS admins, significant failover and a massive deployment of local DNS caches in each neighborhood. Unfortunately, many people have ISPs where they have two servers for an entire timezone maintained by the owner's brother-in-law and, to the extent that they think of DNS at all, it's only for questions like “Can we sell advertising on NXDOMAIN replies?”

But that's an absurd assumption, and I seriously disagree with it. And coming from a part of the world where we actually have ISPs compete (I know!), I find the premises plain laughable.

I'm not saying there aren't ever a reason to use their DNS server, but I fail to see why people would chose to recommend theirs as a general rule (as I've seen lots of places, reddits, etc) and how Google with a straight face think they can claim it will make things "faster", or even worse, more "secure".

Simply said: I call bullshit.

If you are in China or Africa or India or Russia, 8.8.8.8 might not be faster but it's also not hosted by your local totalitarian junta.

I'd rather it get hijacked into a potentially useful Google query plus 8.8.8.8 is extremely easy to remember.

So basically the issue Google is trying to solve, is that in the US where the telecom market is completely failed, there aren't any ISPs which has DNS servers complying to the actual DNS spec or RFC 1035?

Why don't everyone just jump out and say so then? Why does Google and you guys here talk about everything else instead of that? That's by no means an obvious thing to someone coming from the outside.

Does everyone here actually assume that all ISP's on the planet fail to deliver proper DNS with their internet services? What sort of insane assumption is that?

Threads like this is a nice reminder to myself (and maybe others, hint hint) that the cultural gap on the internet is always bigger than you think, even in "small" circles like this.

And everyone: Thanks for the highly enlightening downvotes for asking a IMO very valid question. It's appreciated, informative and certainly constructive.

I've personally experienced dodgy DNS in US, Europe, and Asia. It's not a regional issue so much as a question of market failures: you don't buy a home router based on the quality of its DNS implementation and businesses which offer WiFi certainly don't, and many ISPs figure that NXDOMAIN hijaacking will cost them only a vanishingly small percentage of customers, if any, and see it as a net win.

If any of those apply to you, you have the choice of either going through a frustrating, likely futile, attempt to get the network fixed or you add 8.8.8.8 / 8.8.4.4 to your DNS server list and never think about it again.

> And everyone: Thanks for the highly enlightening downvotes for asking a IMO very valid question. It's appreciated, informative and certainly constructive.

If you don't want to be down-voted, be less confrontational in your replies and do your homework first. You might start by assuming that the people with considerably more experience have good reasons for going to the trouble of deploying a non-default option. A trivial search would show thousands of complaints suggesting that your view of the world is too narrow.

No, it's you who were (wrongly) assuming the opposite. In an extremely rude way, if I might add.

IIRC it was https://code.google.com/p/namebench/ that I used for the speed comparison. Just using it now I see it does a comparison with the popular global DNS providers as well as optionally local providers - it also can test for censorship.

There are many DNS benchmarking tools; https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm looks quite good.

How about: because it's better?

If it is indeed better, which would be counter-intuitive, you should probably not have any problem digging up evidence that it is so? And by evidence, I mean metrics, measurements and stuff like that. You know, scientific standard and all.

If I have DNS server 10ms away, you can bet your ass (and house) I can expect a smaller latency than from one hosted 6000 kilometres away across an Atlantic ocean and then some.

And for me lower latency means faster, and faster means better. And being on the same network as me, I can expect much higher reliability than something halfway across the internet, no matter who hosts it. To me higher reliability is also better.

What definition are you using, and where is your data to prove it?

Unless your ISP's DNS server is a 486 collecting dust next to the janitors toilet, chances are you better served with that than doing continental-hopping network-traffic for every domain you need resolved.

You should look into "anycast". The Google DNS servers are located all across the globe. For example, I get 60ms from Portugal (just +30ms than I get to my ISP's server). And Google's servers, due to higher use, are much more likely to have the records in cache, reducing the overall latency when compared to a server than needs to issue a recursive query for every less commonly used domains.

Ah, if only my ISP's DNS server were 10ms away, and reliably up, and not serving ads instead of NXDOMAIN results.

Not that I'm deeply trusting of 8.8.8.8, but it definitely wins on each of those points. (I use a different "public" server.)

Google's currently don't return false results, return fast results, and have a sane caching system. Recently when a site's DNS went down for a day, google continued serving the results, although expired. Most other providers cleared the cache first, and were serving no result.

I've setup my own caching DNS before, it's really not hard... Most home routers will do this today. And my ISPs server isn't 10ms away, but my router is.

So yes, my ISP sucks.