US government is investigating dns-over-https at Google due to competition concerns

The US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee has launched an investigation into Google’s implementation of DNS over https. The committee may be afraid that Google wants to take dns and thus gain more power over the internet.

The legal committee wants to know whether Google wants to commercially use the data it could collect by turning on DNS-over-https, reports The Wall Street Journal. That is why the committee has sent a letter with questions to the search giant.

Thanks to the step to dns-over-https, the browser skips the dns of providers and establishes a secure connection to a dns server. For now, Google’s implementation is that users’ dns must support the use of doh in order to use it. Firefox maker Mozilla takes a more aggressive approach, switching users to Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 by default, which supports doh.

With dns-over-https, a dns query is encrypted with ssl or tls encryption. As a result, other parties such as providers can no longer monitor which web pages specific users request. While the decision may seem good for user privacy at first glance, not everyone is happy with the decision. In England, where stricter internet rules apply, internet providers were not happy with the plan for a long time. For example, the encryption means that providers can no longer see which URLs are visited, which would cause problems in England with the infamous porn filter. The same applies in the US. Also cdn Akamai is against dns-over-https. Also, some users are not happy with it because the process means sending a DNS query through a central DNS provider like Cloudflare or Google.