UK’s ISP group named the trade association for internet service providers has blamed Mozilla. The group has also nominated Mozilla for the award of “Internet Villain” in 2019. This is because Mozilla is planning to support DNS-over-HTTPS protocol in the Firefox browser which is a terrible idea according to the group.
Internet Services Providers Association says that the plans from Mozilla to support DNS-over-HTTPS inside Firefox are “in such a way as to bypass UK filtering obligations and parental controls, undermining internet safety standards in the UK.”. These comments from the ISPAUK come after Google and Mozilla are constantly criticized by UK government and other advocacy groups around the DoH protocol.
Now, we will also add here that DNS-over-HTTPS is a great measure for privacy but the ISPs in UK believe that this can be misused. Now, we will make you understand why the new protocol is being hated by the UK ISPs as well as the government of UK. Basically, Internet works via sending packets which are known as UDP requests and those packets come back to establish a connection.
Now, these packets are classic plaintext ones and not protected in any form. However, DNS-over-HTTPS encrypts those packets which can not be read by others. Also, these packets will be sent on app level instead of OS level as it currently works.
This means that ISPs will find it very hard or almost impossible to find out DNS requests from users as they are encrypted and on an app-level. As we mentioned earlier, this protocol is designed as a dream for privacy enthusiasts but it makes the job of ISPs a nightmare.
With this new protocol, ISPs will no longer be able to look at customer’s traffic and block “bad sites” as everything is encrypted. For this reason, UK lawmakers are calling this protocol a “threat of UK’s online safety”