As far as I am aware; those are not Verizon's DNS servers but rather Level 3's anycast DNS servers. They are geographically located around the world and using a

As far as I am aware; those are not Verizon's DNS servers but rather Level 3's anycast DNS servers. They are geographically located around the world and using anycast you go to whichever one happens to be closest to you. For most of America you end up in Dallas, TX, for the UK you end up in London, and for The Netherlands I was ending up in Amsterdam. I don't have access to more machines to do traceroutes to see what the last hops are, but you can easily check this for yourself with a traceroute and seeing what network it ends up at. Also, I was under the impression that their DNS servers technically require payment before use (as a commercial entity when handing out over DHCP) and are technically only for Level 3 customers. Everyone and their mother has started using them because they are easy to remember. Here is some more backstory of how the DNS server was originally set up: http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/famous-dns-server/ http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/famous-dns-server/