Answering the implied question in the title: ~45% of traffic to root servers is now Chromium users figuring out whether nonexistent domains get correct nxdomain

Answering the implied question in the title: ~45% of traffic to root servers is now Chromium users figuring out whether nonexistent domains get correct nxdomain responses. That's apparently 60 billion queries per day. Doing the math, a query is some 92 bytes on the wire (50 bytes UDP payload, but the root servers are probably also on ethernet or something similar so I'll include headers), so 487 megabits per second per root server is taken up by this, assuming there are no spikes and everything is perfectly averaged. Edit: and that's the downlink. I forgot the uplink traffic that will be larger due to DNS' nature of echoing the query back with the response(s) attached, plus DNSSEC... Woa. /edit. So what's the next step, Google generously stepping up to running (some of) those root servers and gaining further control and observability over what people do online? Reading further, Firefox solves this by "namespace probe queries, directing them away from the root servers towards the browser’s infrastructure".