> which has worked pretty well for the past 30 years?

But DNS hasn't worked pretty well for the past 30 years. It's been abused for a pretty long time now, both for hijacking requests and for violating privacy.

I don't think that DoH advocates looked at a perfectly good system and just decided to replace it. They looked at a system with significant flaws, saw that this system was holding back consumer privacy and security, and proposed an alternative.

> but DNS is only a tiny part of that problem [...] If you want to get rid those, then get rid of shitty ISPs. This is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

DNS is a huge part of that problem, because without encrypted DNS most people can't realistically keep their DNS queries private. What we're seeing is that we can do all kinds of fancy stuff around encrypting connections, but the DNS is always going to be a hole, and it's always going to make the other protections much less useful.

We want to eventually plug other holes that make websites identifiable. During that process, there are going to be periods where some of the holes are plugged, and some aren't. But that doesn't mean all of the efforts are useless, it means we're in the process of plugging security holes. The fact that we haven't widely deployed SNI encryption or TLS 1.3 does not mean that encrypted DNS is useless, it means that multiple technologies are required to work together to make progress towards meaningfully masking domain names.

We still have very hard problems to solve, like IP addresses themselves and statistical analysis of response sizes to determine which pages are being visited. But it's not much use trying to mitigate those problems if we can't even secure DNS resolution.

In regards to ISPs, in general (where possible) we like to avoid the model of "everyone is insecure but there are no bad actors." Imagine if we had rejected HTTPS because "this is only really a problem if your router is compromised or the ISPs are snooping." We have a solution now that helps reduce the amount of trust we need for ISPs. That's good, we should deploy it. Even if ISPs weren't a problem, it would be worth deploying.

> This will simply lead to ISPs and network operators blocking DoH. And instead of a wonderfully decentralized DNS, we'll end up with centralized DoH in the hands of Cloudflare and their ilk.

I don't see a lot of reason to believe this. First, there was nothing preventing ISPs from blocking DNS and forcing you to use their DNS resolvers in the past, so I don't see what DoH changes about that situation -- other than that it's a meaningful privacy increase, which might make bad actors more aggressive about blocking it. But surely we're not claiming that we should abandon meaningful privacy improvements because we're scared of what ISPs might do.

Second, DoH is decentralized, you can still use other resolvers other than Cloudflare, and you can still chain resolvers together. For the moment, I happen to recommend Cloudflare because I think it's offering more believable privacy promises than other providers, but I understand the concerns about Cloudflare's centralization. It's valid to use something else.

But seriously, what is centralized about DoH that isn't centralized about DNS? The fact that requests can't be hijacked? Did the Internet become centralized specifically because you can't MITM HTTPS requests now? I'm seeing people claim that DoH means every request will go to Cloudflare, and that's just flat out not true: anyone can set up a DoH resolver, even locally on their own network.

Okay, granted, not everyone on your network might respect your DoH settings you put on your Piihole or router, but that's not really different from today. Google already doesn't respect network settings for its DNS resolution on Chromecasts (or at least didn't last I checked). My browser already allows me to override my network settings for DNS. DoH changes nothing about that other than that OSes and routers are lagging on implementing network-wide DoH settings. If you think that staying with DNS would mean that IOT devices will perpetually respect your network settings for domain resolution, then I have bad news for you, because they're definitely going to stop doing that in the future regardless of what technology exists, and some of them have already stopped doing that today.