Mozilla may become the “Internet Villain of the year” for implementing DoH support

The UK Internet Providers Trade Association nominated Mozilla for the “Internet Villain of the Year” award because of the company’s intention to implement DNS support over HTTPS (DoH) in Firefox.

The Internet Services Providers Association (ISPAUK) published a statement in which it accused Mozilla of intending to implement DoH support in order to bypass UK filtering rules and tools parental control.

Unlike classical DNS, DoH sends DNS requests not via UDP, but via HTTPS. In addition, DoH works not only at the operating system level, but also at the application level. All DoH connections are established between the application (for example, a browser or a mobile application) and a secure DoH-compatible DNS server (resolver).

All DoH traffic – it is only HTTPS. Requests to the DNS server, as well as its answers, are encrypted and hidden inside normal web traffic, therefore, they are invisible to outsiders, including Internet service providers. Because of this, DoH is both an ideal privacy protection tool and a nightmare for ISPs and network security vendors.

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UK law obliges telecom operators to block sites with prohibited content (extremist materials, child pornography, etc.). DoH support in the browser will make it much harder for telecom operators to filter traffic, and although some British companies (for example, British Telecom) are in favor of using the protocol, many oppose it.

“At a time where technology and the Internet has become fully mainstream and a driver of innovation and growth, the policy challenges presented by this disruption are now some of the biggest issues facing policymakers around the world”, – stated in ISPAUK

In addition to Mozilla, ISPAUK nominated Donald Trump’s for Internet Fiend of the Year award (for the fact that in the interests of US national security he caused great uncertainty in the complex international supply chain of telecommunications equipment) and Article 13 of the EU’s “Copyright Directive” on expression of opinions on the Internet. This Article required to implement on various platforms “content recognition technology”.

By the way, recently Chinese security experts discovered the world’s first malware that uses DoH to communicate with the C&C server.