And why should I trust CF any more than I trust my ISP? The latter is a European company which is bound by all kinds of privacy protection laws, and which I have to trust to at least some degree because I pay them. The former is an entity which is largely unknown to anyone who isn't tech savvy.

Oh in Western Europe you'll be mostly fine. But I can tell you I noticed the change when I moved to the US. I had no mean to change my ISP-provided router DNS settings, and I couldn't access certain sites, while other would land me on pages filled with ads.

Even in Western Europe, the list of stuff being meddled with isn't empty, it's not large but it does exist. And presumably everything is recorded to be used against you later.

All "normal" UK ISPs (I use a tiny boutique one that doesn't do this but anything advertising on TV is big enough to have agreed to participate) voluntarily filter DNS. Right now in theory they just try to filter out child pornography, "extreme" pornography, and whatever Hollywood told them was a copyright violation. In 2019, in the event they find time to do something other than bickering about their ludicrous "Brexit" the British government wants to upgrade this to let them filter out anything they want.

Their 2018 white paper about this supposes that DNS blocking will be effective against ordinary users, though it notes if you have Tor you aren't blocked. Coincidentally at the same time they were publishing that paper, there was an IETF in London discussing DPRIV which is a set of protocols like DNS over HTTPS designed to er... make such filtering impossible.

Uh. My comment may become 'more' true if the Brexit does happen then.

Which ISP do you use?