http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2009-December/015787.html
highlighted several of these, mainly from the perspective of a network operator or ISP admin, but the usual questions of privacy/tracking/anonymity were raised.
Certainly a monoculture is a dangerous thing, and this makes the sorry state of the global Internet worse in a fairly profound way.
As you may imagine, I have things to say about this. But today, I'd like to submit what I believe to be the impetus behind this new offering:
I believe that Google will begin delivering search results based not only on PageRank but an amalgam of PageRank and other, increasingly "out of band" information.
While a significant portion of my Internet behavior is funneled, in one way or another, through Google search (I don't use mail/voice/groups/etc.) there is a lot of behavior that isn't. This "out of band" behavior is every web site, and especially every chain of web sites that I visit without searching, or after searching for a single site, but then following subsequent links forward.
If search results, and especially ad placement, is generated not just with PageRank, but with a union of PageRank and other information like "site you are most likely to visit within X minutes of these sites" there is the potential of providing even more "relevant" search results, which lead to more "relevant" ad placements, leading to more ad clicks.
This isn't exactly what I would characterize as a "good" in the world, and all of the fears I have heard voiced are well founded. So even though my proposed motivation for this new service is rather benign, the technical underpinning is not any less foreboding.
If this is indeed the motivation for "Google Public DNS", what would this imply ?
First, Google would have an incentive to reduce DNS caching. If you receive name lookups from inside of your own network, or inside of your own system, this decreases the intelligence that is flowing back to Google. It will be very interesting to see what the default cache settings for name resolution are in Google Chrome OS and Android.
Second, the shady world of "search engine optimization" and Adwords fraud is going to get more interesting. These activities could conceivably shift from a passive collection of fake websites and cross-connected "blog entries" to the active generation of network traffic to influence search results.
Which sounds like a real party.