Fedora and fallback DNS servers

Both Google and Cloudflare have reasoned that their profitability is inherently tied to the Internet. If they make the Internet work better, they get more profits. Certainly we can trivially analyse the most superficial version of this thinking as correct - if the Internet somehow goes away Google and Cloudflare are ruined.

For now this aligns their interests and mine very well. In principle the Network might some day be transitioning to a successor technology and we could imagine Google and Cloudflare, if they still existed when that happens, fighting this change, like a 1990s telco (profiting from the previous iteration of the Network the global PSTN) trying to stop the Internet rather than going with the flow, but if that happens it would be in the distant future and I expect to be long dead.

Anyway, under this rationale offering public DNS unbreaks the Internet for some non-trivial fraction of users, which in turn drives up your profitability.

For Cloudflare in particular there's an extra bonus, the 1.1.1.1 server gets to choose which of several valid answers to give in response to queries and so it can choose answers for Cloudflare services that reduce RTT between origin and server since it knows where they both are.

Historically there was effort to help other servers do this in DNS, by telling them the first few octets of the asking client's IP address. EDNS Client Subnet. Unfortunately of course as we see in this thread, people consider their IP address private information and don't want it leaked. So Cloudflare does not use EDNS Client Subnet at all.