Public resolvers dominate the internet, accounting for nearly 60% of recursive DNS usage, while telecom giants represent nearly 9%, according to application traffic solution provider NS1.
NS1 used its DNS Insights to analyze more than 7.5 trillion DNS queries and 15.1 trillion packets over a 90-day period in late 2022 to gather the data.
The report also found that Google is the clearest front-runner when it comes to traffic market share at 30% including traffic from 8.8.8.8, the most popular public resolver, and Google Cloud Platform.
AWS comes in second at 16% but it doesn’t run a public resolver. Cloudflare ranks third on the list at slightly over 9%.
“Cross-referencing the resolver data with geographical information, we found that traffic from smaller countries is often directed to Google and other public resolvers by default. This likely accounts for the smaller percentage of ISP traffic overall – many smaller ISPs find it more convenient and secure to simply lean on Google’s massive footprint rather than create it on their own,” the team that wrote the report stated.
The report also found that IPv6 – which was launched to solve the challenges of IPv4 scarcity while introducing advanced functionality adoption – is still lagging behind projections.
The data showed that just 27.97% of inbound queries came from infrastructure providers using the IPv6 protocol.
“This was a bit surprising to us – we had expected to see wider adoption of the IPv6 protocol among the large infrastructure providers that operate popular DNS resolvers,” the report authors said.
Additional details from the NS1 Global Traffic report are available here.
