The Swiss non-profit that operates the free, privacy- and security-focused public DNS resolver Quad9 says it will stop providing its service to users in France on November 24.
This is the result of a Paris court ruling on October 21 that ordered it to carry out a May 13 blocking order against pirate streams of the WTA women’s tennis tournament, or pay 1,000 euros a day.
Quad9 is saying that compliance is “technically unfeasible, and implementation directly contradicts our mandate to serve the public.”
The case was brought by beIN Sports France, who are the WTA women’s tennis tournament rights holders in that country.
The penalty was to last until the last match of the tournament, on November 14, which, according to Quad9, means the total due would be 24,000 euros, not counting its legal costs.
beIN had asked for 10,000 euros a day for each domain that was still reachable through Quad9, up to a total of 580,000 euros per day for all 58.
The May 13 order was not limited to Quad9. Google and Whalebone, the operator of DNS4EU, received the same order, which initially covered six domains, and then 58, and also “sites not yet identified” – with the latter to be reported to the relevant regulator ARCOM. The judge in the case, in our translation, said that Quad9 “does not demonstrate” it cannot perform geolocated blocking, and that it “appears to contradict itself to the detriment of its opponent” – because it does block malware domains. The court also said that the fact Quad9 is not taking any steps to comply with the order “justifies imposing a penalty.”
Earlier in the month, the same court turned down beIN’s request for penalties against Cloudflare and several VPN providers, who had blocked at least some of the domains in question.
The organization explains that it cannot block the domains in question because it has no way of knowing which of its users are in France, since it does not keep any information about them. “We have no database of users associating them with jurisdictions.”
“We do not keep dossiers of our users at all,” Quad9 said. “Nor do we think there should be a way to force users to identify themselves before they can connect to the internet.”
Quad9 could block the names of the sites in question for every user, but that would mean applying a French court ruling to every internet user in the world. And, the organization says, its experience with geoIP blocking has been poor, citing the example of Sony Music using a VPN to get around the block Quad9 put in place in Germany, which led to a court fining the DNS service for contempt. Quad9 eventually won the case, but after spending a lot of time and money.
“We categorically refuse to alter or lie to you about the DNS responses you receive in a way that opposes your expectations,” the non-profit states.
In addition, Quad9 said it would be “like holding a piece of newspaper in front of a stadium full of people to block the view of a concert” – i.e., ineffective, as users can change their DNS service.
Quad9 said that it had about 20 other similar cases pending in France and “Quad9 cannot survive the accumulation of penalties yet to be assessed in 20 other pending cases, nor those of future cases similar to the one brought by beIN.”
An appeal is pending, but in the meantime, the only way to protect itself is to stop serving users in France.
Quad9’s CTO said on Hacker News that the service will most likely leave France by using IP address-based location to cut off users there. But when asked why the same method wouldn’t be used to block just the sites in question, the CTO is quoted as saying that this would mean Quad9 accepting DNS-based content restrictions, something it is not prepared to do.
The French who will lose the service include EDF, SNCF, France Télévisions, the Institut Pasteur, the Marseille public hospital group, the national research network RENATER, and several regional and local councils. “All these users will lose service on November 24 because of the legal risks facing Quad9 in France,” the non-profit warned.
Quad9 warned that “actions that seem reasonable and infrequent today will tomorrow become an avalanche of petty demands used to suppress political, religious, economic, or social outcomes.”
And, “Once the tools of censorship are built, they are rarely used sparingly or justly.”
On October 6, Reclaim The Net reported that Quad9 was considering leaving the French market, and at the time, the service said, “There is no legally useful way for us to define a French user.”
This is not the first time a DNS service has been forced to leave the French market – OpenDNS did the same in 2024 over a similar case brought by Canal+.
Earlier in the year, the French parliament passed a sports law that allows regulator ARCOM to have “suspected” pirate streams blocked in real time during a live broadcast, and checked afterwards.
In the US, there have been two bills introduced this year that would have the effect of forcing DNS resolvers to block sites. The American Copyright Protection Act, introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa in September, names “providers of domain name resolution services” among those that a court could order to block a site.
The DEFEND IP bill, submitted by Sen. Thom Tillis and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, would cover public DNS resolvers with annual revenue over $100 million.
What the Paris court has essentially done is turn a DNS resolver, whose job is to provide the IP address for a given domain name, into the enforcer of a broadcaster’s rights.
In doing that, the court has given Quad9 three options: start blocking the sites in question for the whole world, start tracking which of its users are in France, or leave the market.
Quad9 has chosen the third option, the only one that does not involve tracking users or censoring content.
