AppleInsider | Google launches free Public DNS:

The new service enables users to bypass their own Internet Service Provider's DNS to use Google's performance-optimized name lookup server
...
Other free DNS services are already available, but most cover their costs by redirecting failed lookups (for mistyped or incorrect URLs) to ad supported pages that suggest alternatives. So far, Google isn't performing any such commercial redirects. Instead, the company is providing the service for free as a way to collect information about how users use the Internet on an anonymous and aggregated level.


Of course it's anonymous. It's worth more to Google as anonymous data.

Anyhow, the advantage is no 404 ads? Is that really a huge advantage? And then you provide Google free labor? Interesting. Are we really so excited to use Google that we'd like to give up some privacy -- maybe not individually specific privacy, but our privacy as collective demographics -- to avoid a few cruddy ads?

There's a politics of the collective that is being almostly entirely forgotten in our age of "postmodern" individuality (let's just call it "late capitalism", right?).

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