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.
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.