FSLY is up almost 18% today following the news that Apple is working with Cloudflare and Fastly to create Oblivious DNS, a new standard that can make it harder to track a user’s online activities.
While the Internet offers various privacy protection measures for its denizens, including encryption and VPNs, one of the areas that are more easily trackable is the Domain Name System. Effectively the address book for the Internet, DNS enables the use of domain names that link to specific website IP addresses, making the entire system more usable to humans.
In a bid to make DNS more private and less trackable, a group of engineers at Apple, Cloudflare, and Fastly have come up with Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH). By separating the IP address from the query, it offers the chance for DNS queries to be made safer as not all parties have access to both the IP or query at the same time.
NET is modestly up following the news. Not sure why it’s affecting FSLY so much more than NET.
One possibility is that this news came up top of another rumor last Friday that CSCO is interested in acquiring FSLY. This rumor is still not confirmed, but not dead either.
One likely factor in FSLY’s pop is that an appeals court judge has ruled against Trump’s ban on TikTok, which was the one event that caused it to plummet awhile back.
Thanks for sharing this… will this Oblivious DNS reduce threats of DDoS… or affect third party tracking due to cookies etc… or both
I am trying to understand what impact will it have on NET (who has strong business built up to secure from DDoS) and TTD (who is dependent ad revenue with third party tracking).
Clearly, if NET is participating, it would not be expecting negative impact to its revenue…
I’m no expert in this stuff, but here is some information that I came across.
These two papers describe the original concept/theory behind Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS (ODoH), the idea being basically having DNS queries themselves encripted, so that proxies cannot see what’s inside, and it prevents the DNS resolver from seeing who sent the query to begin with.