In yet another case of a made-up conspiracy like the Craigslist blocking incident to drum up support for Internet regulation, OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch is misleading the public about Verizon Wireless supposedly blocking OpenDNS servers.  Ulevitch claims that Verizon Wireless is blocking OpenDNS which is an ad-supported Domain Name Service (DNS).  OpenDNS sells advertisers data on its customers web browsing habits and Ulevitch claims that network providers want this for themselves.  But even this alleged motive is suspect because U.S. broadband providers are not selling its DNS data to advertisers and carriers like Verizon and AT&T have promising not to sell customer data without some kind of meaningful consent from its customers.  Furthermore, the evidence shows that the Verizon Wireless network does not block OpenDNS.

I’ve asked various people to test OpenDNS blocking who have access to Verizon Wireless and I’ve gotten a response from someone within Verizon.  He tested the his Verizon Wireless data service from a PC tethered to his Droid (Android OS) phone and verified that OpenDNS is not blocked.  I’ll update this post with more results from people outside of Verizon but this person at Verizon has little incentive to lie about this because it’s so easy to verify.

So what in the world could Ulevitch be complaining about?  Is it the Android OS based phones which has nothing to do with the network?  I quick Google search on Android OS DNS settings is that it’s easy to set in Wi-Fi but the setting is less exposed in the mobile network interface (3G).  But the 5th search result pointing to a forum post at XDA-Developers indicates that the setting can be configured with the “setprop” command in Android OS (which is a Linux based operating system).  The same forum thread also talks about other Linux configuration files that can be modified.

But does the majority of consumers even care about geeking out in Linux configuration files and DNS settings?  It’s not like ISPs charge any money for their DNS service and DNS has always been provided by the network provider as an included service.  The only reason to use a 3rd party DNS server is when an carrier’s DNS is unreliable or too slow and that’s generally not the case.  Furthermore, the bigger threat and alternative to OpenDNS is Google DNS which is a faster DNS service because Google owns more servers that are distributed across the Internet.  So it’s Google that Mr. Ulevitch should be concerned about and not some imaginary blocking at Verizon Wireless.

[Cross-posted at Digital Society]