June 27, 2026
DNS and the City
Choosing a Public DNS Resolver
The internet picked favorites fast, and yes, people are arguing over the magic numbers
TLDR: A new tool compares almost 30 services that help your device find websites, sorting them by privacy, location, and features. Commenters immediately turned it into a fan war, with many chanting for Quad9, others demanding more choice, and one very online user showing off a do-it-yourself setup.
A new public DNS resolver guide tried to do the sensible thing: line up nearly 30 internet address-book services and let people sort them by privacy, country, filtering, and whether they’re run by a company, nonprofit, or lone volunteer. In plain English, it’s a chooser for the service your device asks when it wants to find a website. But the community instantly turned this calm comparison table into a full-on popularity contest.
The loudest energy by far? Team Quad9 barged in like they were ending the debate before it began. One commenter dropped the ultra-confident “9.9.9.9 is all you need,” while another basically said, yes, Quad9 is great, but please keep the alternatives coming because the internet should never become a one-brand monopoly. That’s the real split here: convenience versus decentralization, or as normal people might call it, “just give me the easy answer” versus “don’t let one giant own the pipes.”
Then came the classic comments-section flexing. One power user rolled in with a deeply homemade setup involving local tools, preloading favorite sites every hour, and a side-eye at internet providers that felt half technical diary, half action-movie monologue. Meanwhile, another commenter asked the obvious practical question everyone else forgot: why doesn’t this site include a speed test? If people are choosing a behind-the-scenes internet helper, they want to know which one is fast, not just pure on paper.
So yes, the article is a neat tool. But the comments made it clear the real story is tribal loyalty, privacy anxiety, anti-big-tech vibes, and people treating strings of numbers like sports teams.
Key Points
- •The article provides an interactive tool for selecting a public DNS resolver using hard filters such as transport, DNSSEC, IPv6, jurisdiction, and operator type.
- •It also includes a sortable comparison table covering 29 global public resolvers and their features.
- •Each resolver entry includes operational details such as jurisdiction, commercial or nonprofit status, IP addresses, filtering variants, and encrypted DNS protocol support.
- •The comparison highlights privacy-related attributes including logging policies, data retention descriptions, and ECS usage.
- •Providers listed include major commercial services, nonprofit and registry-run resolvers, community-run options, and EU-funded infrastructure.