For the record, I share your cautious confidence in Cloudflare. For an entity of its size, Cloudflare has been amazingly good both at being transparent and at a

For the record, I share your cautious confidence in Cloudflare. For an entity of its size, Cloudflare has been amazingly good both at being transparent and at actively finding ways that people don't have to extend any trust. Cloudflare even suggested real cryptographically blinded tokens as an alternative to CAPTCHAs (and saw it shot down by people who didn't understand the crypto, and were sure it was some kind of trap...). Cloudflare could easily go bad in the future, but has been refreshingly good so far. But most of the risks "native" to large commercial entities seem to have been using DNS queries to target advertising. That sucks, but it's not my top concern. I'm more worried about outside pressure to censor the Internet, which is more of a non-native risk. From my point of view, censorship is a bigger worry than targeted advertising. It can happen here, and it's already happening in a lot of "theres". If some major government, or coalition of governments, or even major private pressure group, wants disappear something from the DNS, and there are only 15 or 20 TRRs, then it's a lot easier to lean on those TRRs than it would be to lean on hundreds of ISPs. In any given case, it may also be easier than leaning on the registrars. Heck, since there's a centralized Mozilla policy for who gets to be a TRR, they can just lean on Mozilla. Maybe it won't matter because Chrome will have more market share or whatever, but it doesn't seem quite right for Mozilla to rely on that. Even if Cloudflare happens to be much better about resisting filtering pressure than most ISPs, and stays that way, there's still only one Cloudflare that has to be subverted. And there's going to be pressure on Mozilla to include TRRs that might not even be as safe as Cloudflare. You can already see the pressure to bake censorability into the TRR system. Look at the comments on the Mozilla consultation. You have a lot of people talking about how TRRs need to be able to (secretly!) respond to government blocking requests. You even have what looks like a coordinated push from UK commenters to protect secret non-government blocking at TRRs. Yeah, we'll all disagree about whether X or Y should be censorable. Most people can name something that they think should be censored, and I think that a lot of people's lists are getting bigger rather than smaller. But once you start creating infrastructure for filtering, everybody comes out of the woodwork and starts trying to get their particular filtering priorities. It's hard for a centralized system to resist them. The real answer is probably to switch to something a lot more decentralized and anarchic than the DNS can ever be. After all, in the end, there's only one ICANN. But that will take a very long time, if it ever happens at all. In the meantime, it seems really unsafe to concentrate power over the DNS in a limited number of pressure points.