If you have no working DNS, it's hard to google stuff...
There are two types of people - those that just want dns to work at all so they can get stuff done, and those who have working dns but want to 'upgrade' for privacy/filtering reasons.
They're not random, they're a French non-profit (created by cofounders of nextdns, btw). Why wouldn't people trust them? In my country most people use a DNS hosted by their ISP, and there are a lot of small ISPs all around. I suspect it's similar everywhere. How is it different?
And anyway, I trust a random French small company more than I trust Google.
Well yes exactly, the only reason you'd switch to a trusted service over a default is to hopefully shield from DNS poisoning and other shenanigans. It would need to be a proven trustworthy service, and just about anyone with a few hours of spare time and literally no cash can open a French NGO, they've got the lowest barrier for entry of any EU country. Just slapping on a nextdns logo doesn't mean shit. It's completely pointless unless it's an EU official government service financed directly by our tax dollars.
Google has a reputation to uphold, so while you can be certain they'll be datamining the shit out of your requests they are also unlikely to be direct malicious actors.
It's the "anycast" mapping of the IP to geographically and network diverse hosts to connect the user to the "closest" (for some value of latency that stays within the data governance jurisdiction).
To do this, you basically have to own a large enough IP block that backbones will deal with it, and route map it.
There are two types of people - those that just want dns to work at all so they can get stuff done, and those who have working dns but want to 'upgrade' for privacy/filtering reasons.