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Quad9 Faces French Legal Challenge Over Global Site Blocking

Quad9, a Swiss DNS operator, faces legal challenges in France over global site blocking demands, citing privacy and copyright concerns.
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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 โ€“ 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 Quad9โ€™s operations, and the circumstances surrounding the case, including those pertaining to legal jurisdiction.

Quad9 refers to the position taken by Canal+ as โ€œan absurd application of copyright law.โ€ Thatโ€™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.

โ€œWe do not have geographic blocking methods to localize the censorship activity, as our system is designed to treat everyone in every nation identically,โ€ the blog post said, noting that this is intentional, in order to preserve privacy and comply with GDPR and Swiss Data Privacy laws.

However โ€“ 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 โ€“ while the French courtโ€™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 โ€œequivalent to map publishers โ€“ we let users know where to find resources, using a publicly accessible set of data (the DNS) from which to create the โ€˜mapโ€™,โ€ and added that, โ€œanyone can configure a DNS recursive resolver on their own in just a few seconds.โ€

What distinguishes Quad9 is the inclusion of malware and phishing protection, which sites that are now blocked will be left without โ€“ 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 โ€“ Vercara received the same as Quad9, while Google, Cloudflare, Cisco, and others faced similar challenges, leading to Cisco leaving the French DNS market.

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