The promises of the European public DNS: Antimalware and blocking illegal content

The large DNS services are outside of Europe, despite the fact that they are essential for the proper and secure operation of the network. For this reason, the European Union has proposed to create one.

As any Wikipedia will tell you, a DNS service is an Internet service that translates domain names, this service being essential to be able to initiate any communication with another computer by accessing it by name.

Once this point has been explained for those who did not know what we were talking about, let’s go to the next step. DNS are free services, this means that companies are not usually very interested in offering them (so you can improve your internet speed).

And hence, over the years, in Europe we have been left without our own DNS, Now the largest DNS services are outside our borders. For example, Google Public DNS, one of the most used, is American.

This is a problem, since leaves Europe at the mercy of foreign companies that do not even physically operate on our continent. In other words, they are outside companies that have servers outside.

For this reason the European Commission wants to finance a service for Europe independent of alternatives such as those offered by Cloudflare DNS, Quad9, OpenDNS, Comodo Secure DNS and other services.

According to the published project documentation by the CE1, DNS4EU will be a public service that will seek the massive adoption in the administration, companies, education and private users.

And it will guarantee high availability with low latency from anywhere in Europe, having a presence in all relevant traffic exchange points.

Some of the services it will offer will be security against cyber threats by blocking malware and phishing with information from the CERTs of each country. It will filter URLs that host content declared illegal by the courts.

Optionally, you can offer paid services such as filtering, monitoring and support, adapted to the needs of certain sectors. In addition, internet providers will be able to use it for their clients as a white label.

It will be available not only through traditional DNS interfaces but also through DoT (DNS over TLS) and DoH (DNS over HTTPS), being compatible with IPv6. The service may collect metadata from user activity, but must comply with European data protection GDPR legislation and in any case will not be monetized.

The companies chosen to maintain the service will have to demonstrate that they are not influenced by foreign governments. and they will not be able to use hardware or software in sensitive points made by risk companies, in the style of those that will mark the future Cybersecurity Law.

The budget is 14 million euros for the construction of said server. All this information is available in the European specifications and, according to experts, it can be good or bad news depending on how you approach that content censorship.