While most of the work iff has done with dns pertains to censorship, which is difficult to defend against by a registrar, but is there any DNS provider that respects users freedom and rights and is based in India? (Used by IFF perhaps) or does it remain to be the exclusive domain of foreign service providers?
Edited to add: dns registrars that respect privacy and rights of their customers(that is website owners)
A DNS service is the internet’s telephone directory. You look up addresses corresponding to names via DNS servers.
A domain name registrar, on the other hand, is the guy you go to get a telephone connection.
[…] but is there any DNS provider that respects users freedom and rights and is based in India?
No.
But if your question is: can it be done? The answer is yes, and it’s not too difficult. E.g. we do that for our customers.
If you don’t want to run your DNS server, you can opt for DNS over Tor. Do be careful how you set this up though: Tor works over TCP and DNS is UDP (primarily) so you’d need your DNS packets wrapped in TCP leading to a higher latency.
DNS over HTTPS is certainly another option, but with this defaulting to the service provided by a single company – Cloudflare – it’s best avoided (it’s actually devastating for the openness of the web; c.f. the walled garden argument).
I should have clarified my question further, I was asking about dns registrars that respect privacy and rights of their customers, as far as I can grasp from this dns over tor and https are options for me as a user not as a website owner.
What do you mean by DNS registrar? Are you referring to nameservers?
When you register a domain, the domain registrar typically, provides you with a few default nameservers. There’s no reason for you to use those though, and you can run your own nameservers. That’s what most large organizations typically opt for. Or, if you provide a distributed service, you are probably looking at custom nameservers.
Or, are you referring to WHOIS privacy? WHOIS privacy is a function of the rules set by both the domain name registrar, and the TLD operator. E.g. the .in domain does not allow WHOIS guards, so no matter which registrar you go to, you won’t get privacy. However, some registrars do get around this by a legal trick – they would sell you a domain but hold back the ownership so that their name shows up on WHOIS instead of their customers’.
I understand that I can change my nameservers and that is what I settled on but still that doesn’t change anything about the registrar. My registrar loads about 19 tracking elements on the login page including google ad services and analytics. Also it throws two captcha’s at me on login, one google and second [a better?] hcaptcha one. Their privacy policy permits them to share my personal data with many third parties, this is something the .in policy of unlisted details cannot help protect me from. Thus the registrar is not clearly a digital rights respecting one while I can find many registrars outside India(that only accept USD) which are quite good at such things:they do not load any third party tracking or google captchas and also support digital rights organisations. It seems strage that no such option based in India is well known to me. This also makes me wonder: What registrar does IFF use?
I am a bit confused. In general, your registrar and hosting provider does not have to be the same organization. I think the issue you have is with your hosting provider, and not the registrar. If I understand correctly, it is their CMS’s administration login page that throws the captchas and loads the trackers. If this is the case you have two options – move to a different provider who provide the same CMS with better confidentiality, or, roll your own.
If you use an open source CMS, it shouldn’t be too hard to roll your own, unless you are looking to scale. I’ll be happy to help you, if you need any!
What registrar does IFF use?
While I don’t know the registrar, I can see this forum is behind Cloudflare which should be of concern given that they operate in a PRISM geo.
No I was referring to cpanel login on my domain administration panel. I had to login when I used to use their nameservers and for shifting my nameservers.
I don’t use a cms, my website is static and I use a custom python script to generate a new page in html. and deploy it to netlify.
And also loads google domains by default but works fine without them.
I have found a solution gandi.net(strange name) seems to be good, they support many opensource projects and support INR. While I am not endorsing any company here it is certainly better than my current dns registrar.
I have found a solution gandi.net(strange name) seems to be good, they support many opensource projects and support INR.
Indeed! Been with gandi for years now, and I always recommend them 
(I didn’t want to name names either, so.)
For reference of others I would like to point that they only accept credit cards and cryptocurrency in India due to their undisclosed baking partner’s limited support, You may need to know this before creating a new account.
Amazon AWS supports several TLDs and is legally registered in India (They support GST Invoices if you need them). The AWS portal itself is privacy-friendly (no Google captcha for eg) as it is tailored to businesses.
The list of Accredited Registrars for .in doesn’t give me much hope either.
Though it may not load load as many third party trackers(though at the homepage they are 31), but the first party tracking they do is well known… Though they certainly don’t create inconvenience for customers.
Yes, for future visitors I would say AVOID FOLLOWING THIS LIST some companies feel outright sketchy.