Switzerland-based Quad9, a global public recursive DNS operator, has announced that it is facing a legal challenge in France regarding censorship.
This one was launched by the television channel Canal+ and comes after a similar attempt in Germany by Sony Music, which Quad9 was able to resolve in its favor late last year.
Now, as Canal+ has gone to court with its demand to block a list of sites globally, claiming copyright infringement, Quad9 said it is forced to comply since a Paris court ruled in favor of the French company. Otherwise, Quad9 risks fines – but said it will appeal, despite the high cost of legal battles, and hopes to once again come out on top.
A blog post explained the nature of Quad9’s operations, and the circumstances surrounding the case, including those pertaining to legal jurisdiction.
Quad9 refers to the position taken by Canal+ as “an absurd application of copyright law.” That’s because as a recursive DNS resolver, the service, operated by a non-profit, does not have paid customers, or contracts and interactions with the sites it is now forced to block.
“We do not have geographic blocking methods to localize the censorship activity, as our system is designed to treat everyone in every nation identically,” the blog post said, noting that this is intentional, in order to preserve privacy and comply with GDPR and Swiss Data Privacy laws.
However – Switzerland and France are signatories to the Lugano Convention, which allows cross-border civil lawsuits. And this is how Quad9, despite having no office or staff in France can be prosecuted there – while the French court’s order, since Quad9 is unable to selectively block sites in certain areas only, means that French law is effectively getting enforced globally.
Quad9 said that it and other similar operators are “equivalent to map publishers – we let users know where to find resources, using a publicly accessible set of data (the DNS) from which to create the ‘map’,” and added that, “anyone can configure a DNS recursive resolver on their own in just a few seconds.”
What distinguishes Quad9 is the inclusion of malware and phishing protection, which sites that are now blocked will be left without – something Quad9 notes is the opposite of what one expects governments and law enforcement to strive towards.
The post also mentions that Canal+ presented site-blocking demands to others – Vercara received the same as Quad9, while Google, Cloudflare, Cisco, and others faced similar challenges, leading to Cisco leaving the French DNS market.
