This should bother people here more than it does. The last thing the Internet needs is even more dependence upon Google. They've made it quite clear through their actions that they're not supporters of a free and open Internet: https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype-l...

If people don't push back against these kinds of things, Google will continue to abuse their power. There shouldn't be an army of apologists here making excuses for them.

As far as a solution goes, they can simply make 8.8.8.8 a fallback when something goes wrong. It's a disturbing trend to see them forcing things like this upon users.

It doesn't bother me because it's a Chromecast, an appliance I don't want or need. If I needed something similar, I could get it from other manufacturers.

First they came for the appliances I don't want or need, because I don't use appliances I don't want or need.

This has been discussed to death. Slippery slope, etc., etc.

I disagree. People who care about not hitting 8.8.8.8 simply do not own a Chromecast.

Not really, before you could firewall it off from the rest of your network - though now you can just masquerade 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 to your DNS server of choice

pass in quick on { $lan $wireguard } proto udp to { 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4 } port 53 rdr-to 192.168.2.1

Locally I run Unbound for caching, local dns zones and ad/malware domain blocking[2]. I have a DNS forwarder in Unbound configured to a local Stubby[1] instance that does dns over tls to Cloudflare.

Having done "big data" contract work for the largest telco in my current country of residence who are some of the worst skilled people I have ever work with, your local ISP is highly likely abusing your DNS history profiling your household for various questionable things just as much as Google. At least with Cloudflare they have a clear privacy policy[3] and I have faith their technical skill to anonymize data and use it can't be as bad as my ISP.

[1] https://dnsprivacy.org/wiki/display/DP/DNS+Privacy+Daemon+-+... [2] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts [3] https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/commitment-to-priv...