Hi there, I’m looking to get into self-hosting for privacy reasons and I wanted to ask y’all: how inadvisable is it to utilize an ISP-owned router/modem? I feel like they’re able to track everything I do online with their more than likely integrated spyware.


You might be thinking of PKI and certificate trusts.
Tier 1 in DNS terms are high-level peered (peered with other tier 1 servers in major network segments) and just refer requests either downstream or to other tier 1 servers. This is no longer as necessary with CDNs everywhere, and DNS infrastructure no longer has to mirror routing landscapes, but it seems that opennic.org is still organised in this way.
Anecdotally, I switched a small network to use opennic in 2019 and it was a disaster, never again. I see that the DE servers are still being recommended to me in Canada, so I guess nothing has changed. Opennic is an example of a good idea with terrible execution.