Supporters Named for New DNS Resolver Policy to Improve Privacy

The recently proposed ‘European DNS Resolver Policy‘, which aims to foster better standards for privacy and transparency across resolver services for the internet’s Domain Name System (e.g. those run by UK ISPs and third-party providers), has today secured support from several leading organisations.

At present a lot of DNS resolvers, which work to convert Internet Protocol (IP) addresses into a human-readable form (e.g. 123.56.32.1 to examplezfakedomain.co.uk) and back again, do not recognise key privacy legislation. This is partly because many of them are designed for or in different markets from where their authors reside.

As we reported back in March (here), the new DNS Resolver Policy is an attempt to change that dynamic by, among other things, laying out clear standards for the operators’ of such systems, and setting expectations regarding the collection, use and retention of personal data (i.e. this will also be made transparent to end-users).

On the whole this represents a good idea, although at the time of our last update we noted that no DNS resolvers had yet introduced support for the policy, but that was expected to change toward the end of last month. The good news is that we now have a list of organisations that are backing the move and it contains some familiar names.

Early Supporters of the DNS Resolver Policy
• AdGuard
• DNSFilter
• Farsight Security
• The Internet Watch Foundation
• Open-Xchange
• Quad9
• Whalebone
• 419 Consulting

Further organisations are expected to confirm their support for the initiative in due course.

Andrew Campling, Policy Author and Director of 419 Consulting, said:

“Having worked with a wide range of organisations across Europe and North America to develop the policy, I’m gratified to see organisations confirm their commitment to put it into practice.”

The policy is designed to apply to both standard and encrypted DNS, including the recently introduced DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) protocol.