Totally different thing.

Say internet surfing is you driving a car.

DNS is your Google Map/Waze etc... that tells you where to go, you use it before enter your car, so people may see where you're going by looking at your screen. (Don't ask me why you can't use it after you got in the car, it's just how it is, DNS queries comes before your device starts the connection with the site you wanna go)

HTTP is your car, people can see things inside when you're driving, see who's in it, what's in it.

HTTPS is your car too, but with dark tinted window, people can't see what's the inside of your car.

Now people use HTTPS so when you transport a box of things, say, your password, people won't be able to see what you're carrying, but would still be able to know where you're going because hey saw your phone screen.

DNS over HTTPS or TLS is the same things, tinted glass, but this time it's a privacy screen protector on your phone (in this case could be your ISP, could be someone else), so people other than you don't know where you're going.

Of course there's still ways to see where you're going by seeing where the car go, as the ISP still knows which IP you're connecting to.

However thanks to CDNs, nowadays the same IP can be the home to a lot of websites, it's like you wanted to go to a McDonald's, they will see you go into a specific shop back then, so they know you went to the shop, nowadays with this method they can only know your car went to a shopping mall, inside got a lot of shops, but they don't know what you did or went in the mall after you parked your car, if they try to block this shopping mall, no biggie, there is a lot of same shopping malls with McDonalds, you just go to any other malls to buy your favourite Filet-O-Fish because they have the same shops there too. Sure they can ban all the malls, but that would also come at a cost of blocking all other shops as well, like Cloudflare for example, the government would be banning tens of thousands of websites, even some government owned ones if they wanna ban them.

What MCMC tried to do was say "No you can't use Waze!" and force your phone to open a government developed map (let's say "Keranamu Maps) whenever you try to use Waze, but never tell you, the UI looks the same, but everytime you search McDonalds it will say it is permanently closed and will not give you the route. They didn't let you know this was happening and just asked Samsung/Apple to do so quietly behind your back. After the public found out, they say this is totally not because they want to limit your choices, but because the food is unhealthy and they're worried for your health so they curi curi do it before telling you.

Just try to be as layman as possible, may not be entirely accurate because networks are not cars, but that's the gist of it.

This post has been edited by Killmeplsok: Sep 9 2024, 11:30 AM