Remember that rumor a while back that Google was going to build its own version of the Internet? It turns out that the idea might not be so far-fetched after all.
Last month, Google revealed that it was working on its own protocol that could perhaps one day replace HTTP, dubbed SPDY. Today, Google announced that it’s going after another fundamental piece of the Internet: DNS.
Google has launched what they’re calling Google Public DNS. Here’s how and why Google says they’re attacking the issue:
“You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names — e.g., www.google.com — into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers — e.g., 74.125.45.100 — that computers use to communicate with one another.
Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users’ web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable.
As people begin to use Google Public DNS, we plan to share what we learn with the broader web community and other DNS providers, to improve the browsing experience for Internet users globally. The goal of Google Public DNS is to benefit users worldwide while also helping the tens of thousands of DNS resolvers improve their services, ultimately making the web faster for everyone.”
While “speed” might indeed be the end result for users, the data could be immensely valuable to Google as a company that is increasingly all about gathering more and more information from multiple channels in order to serve better advertising. Here’s what Google does have to say about the new DNS service and data collection:
“In the permanent logs, we don’t keep personally identifiable information or IP information. We do keep some location information (at the city/metro level) so that we can conduct debugging, analyze abuse phenomena and improve the Google Public DNS prefetching feature. We don’t correlate or combine your information from these logs with any other log data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network. After keeping this data for two weeks, we randomly sample a small subset for permanent storage.”
If you want to try Google DNS for yourself, there’s already a site that will tell you how to do it, complete with toll-free telephone support.
Like many Google projects, this one will likely take many months if not years to gain traction with users, but nonetheless, it’s going to be yet another interesting piece of the Google puzzle to keep an eye on.
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Via Mashable
Personal comment:
Quite worrying I think...