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Comment by AshamedCaptain

19 hours ago

> That's true, but that's no reason to go from an imperfect solution to a nonsolution.

This is textbook politician's fallacy. Yes, it may be preferable to continue with a "non-solution" if the solution proposed is stupid enough.

No it's not. I'm saying don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

DoH does solve a problem for many people. Many large ISPs will sell your DNS requests, use them for targeted advertising, tamper with responses for various reasons, etc., and so DoH is an improvement over the status quo--not for everyone, but for many users, and I'd guess most users.

You're right, DoH might not be worth adopting if it were "stupid enough", but... it's not stupid enough.

  • Your ISP already has all this metadata and more from other sources, so it is pointless to switch to DoH in this case, and if you do you willingly give this metadata to Cloudflare, which (for the majority of users) may even be in a better position to do evil.

    • > Your ISP already has all this metadata and more from other sources

      If you combine this with ECH and a good blocker, no they do not. That's exactly why Spain is blocking around 60% of the internet during football games now; the ISPs cannot tell which websites and subscribers are pirating football streams.

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In the Politician's Fallacy, the chosen solution doesn't solve the problem. In this example, DoH solves many of the problems, perhaps not optimally, but better than the "do nothing" choice.

  • So it doesn't really solve the problem, and may generate more (privacy) problems of its own. "doing nothing" may be the better solution here, which was the entire point made in the original episode.

To save some googling the Politicians Fallacy is this one:

We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.