DOP 339: DNS Is Old Tech (And That's Why It Still Runs the Internet)

#339: DNS has been around since the 1980s. Nobody’s writing blog posts about how it changed their life. But every single thing on the internet depends on it – including all those AI tools everyone’s excited about.

Anthony Eden has been in the DNS business since the late nineties, when he was CTO of one of the first seven domain registrars after the .com deregulation. In 2010 he started DNSimple, and he did it without a dime of venture capital. Sixteen years later, his 20-person team runs a global DNS infrastructure with 14 edge nodes and 9 origin servers spread across multiple continents.

The conversation covers the mistakes companies make with their domains – running production DNS on a registrar that was never built for it, sharing logins with no access control, zero documentation on why records exist. Anthony breaks down how DNS actually works at scale (unicast vs anycast, the onion layers of resolvers), why your email deliverability problems are probably a DNS problem, and what the www vs no-www debate looks like in 2026.

On AI tools, Anthony’s take is practical. They’re giving his engineers more time to think about problems instead of typing out solutions. But he’s not buying the vibe coding hype – when you run critical internet infrastructure, everyone on the team needs to understand the systems they’re building. And for AI startups hoping to cash out? Most will fail. The twist you put on somebody else’s model won’t be a moat. It’ll just become a feature for something bigger.