Vendor lineage
NextDNS - the resolver as a configurable filter
Public resolver where the blocklists, logging and retention are the user's settings.
NextDNS operates a public resolver whose filtering is configurable per profile: which blocklists apply, what is logged, and for how long. It sits at the opposite end of the same axis as Quad9 - one resolver decides policy for you, the other hands you the controls.
NextDNS was founded in May 2019 by Romain Cointepas and Olivier Poitrey, who had worked together at Dailymotion - Poitrey founded it in 2005, and by the time they started this he was director of engineering at Netflix working on Open Connect, the content delivery network that carries a substantial share of United States internet traffic. Two people who had spent their careers building infrastructure at that scale chose resolution as the thing worth rebuilding.
The premise is stated plainly by the company: unencrypted resolvers operated by internet service providers are harmful to both net neutrality and privacy. Every name a device looks up is a record of what its user is doing, and by default that record is handed in cleartext to whoever supplies the connection. Encrypting the query moves the record to a party the user selects instead.
What it sells is that choice made operable - an anycast resolver with DNS over HTTPS on every platform, selectable blocking lists for advertising, malware, trackers, phishing and crypto-mining, and per-device profiles. It added CNAME uncloaking in 2019, which matters because trackers had begun disguising themselves as subdomains of the site being visited specifically to defeat list-based blocking.
That last detail is the whole shape of this category. Blocking by name and evading blocking by name is a loop with no end state, and each side's move is available to the other. A resolver that filters is a control worth running and not a boundary anyone should treat as fixed.
- NextDNS - company site (configurable public resolver, described as a firewall for the modern internet)
Cited to the company's own site; no third-party encyclopaedia article was found.
- NextDNS help centre, the company on itself: founded in May 2019 in Delaware by two French founders, Romain Cointepas and Olivier Poitrey; the page states that Poitrey founded Dailymotion in 2005 and is Director of Engineering at Netflix working on Open Connect, which it describes as carrying about 30 percent of total United States internet traffic; Cointepas led the mobile and TV department at Dailymotion, where the two worked together for years; the company declares itself a supporter of net neutrality and internet privacy and holds that unencrypted DNS resolvers operated by internet providers are detrimental to both
Fetched 2026-10-01. The page’s own wording is that Poitrey “founded” Dailymotion; it does not say co-founded, and this label reports what the page says rather than resolving that.
- NextDNS: a resolver built on an anycast network, offering DNS over HTTPS across platforms, with selectable blocking lists for advertising, malware, trackers, phishing and crypto-mining, and CNAME uncloaking support added in November 2019