> it's covered by my local legislature

which might not be a good thing in some jurisdictions - see the porn block in the UK (it's done via dns iirc, and trivially bypassed with a third party dns like cloudflare's).

Yeah it has its pros and cons, sadly.

So far I'm lucky and the only ban I'm aware of is on gambling. Which is fine for me personally.

But in a UK case I'd using a non local one as well.

> it's at least not reasonable to complain if there's an outage.

I don't think this is fair when discussing infrastructure. It's reasonable to complain about potholes, undrinkable tap water, long lines at the DMV, cracked (or nonexistent) sidewalks, etc. The internet is infrastructure and DNS resolution is a critical part of it. That it hasn't been nationalized doesn't change the fact that it's infrastructure (and access absolutely should be free) and therefore everyone should feel free to complain about it not working correctly.

"But you pay taxes for drinkable tap water," yes, and we paid taxes to make the internet work too. For some reason, some governments like the USA feel it to be a good idea to add a middle man to spend that tax money on, but, fine, we'll complain about the middle man then as well.

But you can just run a recursive resolver. Plenty of packages to install. The root DNS servers were not affected, so you would have been just fine.

DNS is infrastructure. But "Cloudflare Public Free DNS Resolver" is not, it's just a convenience and a product to collect data.

One can even run a private root content DNS server, and not be affected by root problems either.

(This isn't a major concern, of course; and I mention it just to extend your argument yet further. The major gain of a private root content DNS server is the fraction of really stupid nonsense DNS traffic that comes about because of various things gets filtered out either on-machine or at least without crossing a border router. The gains are in security and privacy more than uptime.)

>That it hasn't been nationalized doesn't change the fact that it's infrastructure (and access absolutely should be free) and therefore everyone should feel free to complain about it not working correctly.

>"But you pay taxes for drinkable tap water," yes, and we paid taxes to make the internet work too. For some reason, some governments like the USA feel it to be a good idea to add a middle man to spend that tax money on, but, fine, we'll complain about the middle man then as well.

You don't want DNS to be nationalized. Even the US would have half the internet banned by now.

You are right infrastructure is important.

But opposite to tap water there are a lot of different free DNS resolvers that can be used.

And I don't see how my taxes funded CFs DNS service. But my ISP fee covers their DNS resolving setup. That's the reason why I wrote

> a service that's free of charge

Which CF is.

DNS shouldn't be privatized at all since it's a critical part of internet infrastructure, however at the same time the idea that somehow it's something a corporation should be allowed to sell to you at all (or "give you for free") is silly given that the service is meaningless without the infrastructure of the internet, which is built by governments (through taxes). I can't even think of an equivalent it's so ridiculous that it's allowed at all, my best guess would be maybe, if your landlord was allowed to charge you for walking on the sidewalk in front of the apartment or something.

DNS is not privatized. This is not about the root DNS servers, it's just about one of many free resolvers out there - in this case one of the bigger and popular ones.