Questions I couldn’t find answers to in the post or linked info about the Trusted Resolver Program: What’s in it for the Cloudflare & NextDNS? Are they getting paid to handle this traffic or paying to have the opportunity to access this data? Can users outside the US opt-in? The comment about having “no plans” to enable this outside the USA seems a bit disingenuous. Hard to believe they built this program / feature a…
The comment actually very clearly says "we do not have plans to roll out the feature in Europe or other regions at this time".
Also I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand yeah, encryption is great and someone sitting between me and my ISP will no longer be able to monitor my DNS queries. On the other hand I don't feel like this is protecting me from anything at this time. Instead of trusting my ISP, I have to trust Cloudflare. And in the meantime my ISP still knows where I am connecting to, between looking at the IP and the SNI (they mention ESNI but we're not there yet and it still just a partial fix).
DoH (in general, not Mozilla's problem) just enables any piece of software or hardware on my network to bypass any security controls I have in place. No more filtering DNS with things like PiHole, no more blocking DNS port on your firewall. This tends to work out great for Google and any random IoT device manufacturer. I could cover this with more enterprisey setups but that's the last thing I want to do at home.
So the average user probably sees no difference either way, nothing lost, nothing gained. But for me it's a clear regression because I lose the little control I had over that traffic and I just spread more data around to yet more companies. Some may even be in legal jurisdictions that are even less trustworthy than where my ISP is located.