Comcast DNS rumors

Rumors are flying around the intertubes about Comcast intercepting DNS traffic and returning replies from their own servers.  The Domain Name Service (DNS) is the Internet service that allows us to use names like “www.google.com” instead of remembering that if you want to do a search, you have to go to 74.125.67.100.  Most people use the DNS servers provided by their Internet Service Provider, but there are a number of reasons you might want to use a third-party service.  Regardless, an ISP intercepting DNS traffic and forcing people to use their own servers is considered shady by many people.

As a Comcast customer who happens to use Open DNS, I naturally took an interest in these rumors.  It took only a few seconds to check to see that I was not, in face, a victim of Comcast’s alleged abuses.  If the discussion on /. and Fark.com is any indication, nobody else is either.  It has been suggested that only Earthlink customers who get service indirectly from Comcast are affected.  The evidence for that is scant, too.  Basically, it seems like a load of crap at the moment.

One thought on “Comcast DNS rumors

  1. We had something like this happen to us back in Jan or Feb of this year. With an internet cable hooked up through a router or directly to the modem (our ISP is Comcast), we could never visit google.com. All other websites loaded just fine. W/ random power cycles to the modem and router, access to google.com would return. This proved particularly annoying since we both use gmail as our primary email client.

    Now that enough time has passed, I really can’t recall what the “fix” was. Perhaps it was just time or something on Comcast’s end. Since that week+ anit-google.com episode, we’ve had not access issues.

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