Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

There's a quiet kind of radicalism in deciding to *stop* doing something you do well, especially in the privacy space where every tool feels like a moral crusade. Mullvad isn't shutting down its DNS because it's broken or because the sky is falling — the company is making a strategic choice to hand the torch to Quad9, a project that already shares its DNA. It's the opposite of the "build a walled garden" mentality that plagues too many open source-adjacent services. Mullvad has always been a bit contrarian. No email required. Flat-rate pricing. A VPN that refuses to do flashy gimmicks. So seeing them say "we don't need to run *everything* for you" fits their character. But it also underscores a deeper truth: the ecosystem around DNS privacy is fragmented, underfunded, and full of duplicated effort. Rather than feeding yet another resolver that only a fraction of their user base touches, Mullvad is betting that Quad9's non-profit model — backed by the Linux Foundation and governed with a genuinely global perspective — is a better use of attention. The reaction on Hacker News is predictably split. Some folks are mourning the loss of a resolver that had a clean privacy policy and no logging. Others are applauding the move as a mature consolidation, noting that Quad9 offers DNS over HTTPS/TLS with a strong stance on blocking malicious domains without collecting personal data. There's also the usual suspicion: is Mullvad preparing for some regulatory regression? Probably not. More likely, this is about maintaining quality without spreading themselves too thin. What makes this interesting is the signal it sends to the broader community. Open source projects often refuse to admit when they shouldn't be the ones running infrastructure. The default instinct is to grow, add features, and own every layer of the stack until you become the very thing you hated. Mullvad just did the opposite: they audited their own sprawl and decided that a partner like Quad9 can do this job better. If more companies in the privacy space did that — recognizing when they should be funders rather than founders — we'd have a lot less half-maintained code out there. The source for this is straight from Mullvad's blog: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/shutting-down-our-public-encrypted-dns-servers-and-sponsoring-quad9-instead. Read it before you get out your pitchfork, because the reasoning is both pragmatic and principled. We don't need every VPN company to run its own DNS silo; we need a few really good ones that play well with others. Mullvad just demonstrated how to bow out gracefully.