[saurik]

FWIW, that would require a drastic rearchitecture of the existing Internet, and thereby seems quite unlikely: most performance-oriented infrastructure is based on being able to approximate the latency to and location of a user based on the origin of their DNS queries, allowing you to direct people to highly localized servers for the actual content; this is how all the major CDNs, such as Akamai, work. When you start using Google's DNS servers the Internet gets a lot slower (and it isn't just a couple hundred milliseconds of latency-to-start: it can mean minutes or hours of time-to-completion when you end up streaming large files and videos from the wrong places... the bandwidth difference can be massive).

[simoncion]

I'm neither a Google employee, nor can I speak for the team that runs Google's public DNS servers, but I'd be surprised if that team didn't consider "using Google's DNS servers [causes] the Internet [to get] a lot slower" to be a major bug. 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are supposed to be anycast addresses which route to the closest server to your location. [0]

[0] https://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#anycast

[saurik]

That same FAQ directly addresses this problem. They are supposedly working with the IETF on a specification solution to the problem (which will likely take forever to get good deployment of, if it even happens).

With existing infrastructure, however, the core issue is not going to be addressed unless Google has some Nyquist limit dominating ratio of DNS servers to the number of servers Akamai has (which is a very large number ;P).

As an example: I am pretty certain Akamai has nodes at the local university campus. Unless Google has a DNS server in my neighborhood (unlikely), I'm going to get streaming data from LA instead of a couple miles away.

http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#cdn

[simoncion]

Hmm. That FAQ entry indicates that there are far few Google DNS servers deployed than I would have expected.

Anyway I bet that there would need to deploy fewer servers to get good CDN performance than one would think.

Drop one along side the YouTube mirrors that are already in every Comcast POP. IIRC, that gets you about 20% of USian Internet users, plus those ISPs which have reasonably decent routes to Comcast's networks. Drop one at every major and medium-sized university. That oughtta give you good geographic coverage.

shrug But what do I know? Not that much, that's for sure!