[cd34]

I would be curious to hear what your DNS settings are currently set to. It isn't extremely likely that Verizon's nameservers went down, though, wouldn't be unheard of.

OpenDNS has an odd history - at one point they were siphoning off records that weren't found and presenting a portal page and capturing that traffic. They stopped doing that after a while, but, it is something to be aware of.

Google DNS reports back the queries that come in to them, so, it is another point of information they can gather for their preferences. Whether that bothers you is a decision you need to make. Google is using that data to analyze where people are going, etc. and uses that in conjunction with social signals to track things.

Faster? Both OpenDNS and Google DNS use anycast in multiple locations - they are likely to be faster than Verizon's nameservers.