Mozilla Nominated for “Internet Villain of the Year”

The company Mozilla has been nominated for the “Internet Villain of the Year” award. The nomination was put forward by the UK’s Internet Services Providers’ Association (ISPAUK) due to Mozilla’s plans to add support for the DNS over HTTPS (DoH) protocol in Firefox.

The main issue is that this technology would allow users to bypass content filtering restrictions established in the country. DoH sends DNS requests over HTTPS instead of UDP, making them indistinguishable from regular web traffic. This makes it much harder for internet service providers to block access to certain websites, as required by UK law for sites containing extremist materials, child pornography, and similar content. While most UK operators oppose this technology, British Telecom has expressed support for it.

Other nominees for the “Internet Villain of the Year” award include U.S. President Donald Trump, for his trade war with China, and Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive, which requires social networks to implement content recognition technologies—a move that has sparked outrage among many users and experts.

Meanwhile, Chinese researchers have discovered the world’s first malware that uses the DoH protocol to communicate with its server. The malware, called Godlua, is a DDoS bot used for attacks. Experts believe that this system could significantly complicate the work of network security tools, as DoH requests are hidden within regular traffic.