In their endless quest for world domination Google recently unveiled their public DNS resolver setup. Such a service is nothing new per se, OpenDNS is doing something similar for some time. Based on the FAQ, Google seems to do this right: A sensible privacy policy and no NXDOMAIN rewriting. They even seem to implement some state-of-the-art (except DNSSEC) tricks to harden their system against forgery attempts.
(Quick aside: one of their tricks to speed up the resolution is to pre-fetch records due to expire from the cache. I’ve proposed exactly the same to the BIND folks at the DNS-OARC meeting in Chicago, 2007.)
On one mailing list, the question was raised how widespread use of Google DNS would affect the Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) like Akamai. After all, they take the source IP of the DNS query as “close to the client, network-wise” and return the best CDN node for that IP address. If now an Austrian User ask the Google DNS servers in the US, then the CDN’s nameserver will return the address of an American CDN node leading to a suboptimal choice.
That effect might become less pronounced (but does not go away) once Google deploys their DNS service in a massive anycast infrastructure. Akamai will then see the request coming from at least the same region as where the end-user is.
Actually, the best move Akamai could do is start a rival DNS resolving infrastructure. If they use anycasted recursors at each of their CDN nodes, that would really simplify their CDN algorithm as the node that gets the DNS request is very likely to be the optimal one for the actual content delivery, too.