A French blocking order that began with six pirate streaming domains in May now covers 118, and two of them belong to a piracy news site.
The order was obtained by the broadcaster beIN Sports from a Paris court in May and requires DNS resolvers to block domains streaming pirated tennis matches. TorrentFreak, whose reporter Ernesto Van der Sar compiled the current list, reconstructed it from the notices Google files with the Lumen database when it receives a blocking order.
The list grew in batches. Google reported 22 additions on 15 June, taking the total to 28, and three further updates on 21 September, 16 October and 26 October each added exactly 30, reaching 118. Nothing appears to have been removed; the notices only add. The measures run until 14 November, when the WTA tennis season ends.
On 22 October the DNS resolver Quad9 said it would stop serving users in France altogether, after a Paris court ruled the previous day on a daily penalty for failing to block the streams.
TorrentFreak checked all 118 domains on 28 October, from a Dutch connection and through a French server. Most still resolved to an address. Four did not resolve at all: predb.click and line.golden-iptv.in are no longer registered, the second of them one of the six domains in the original order; 4kib.xyz has been suspended by its registrar; and fermin37.com stopped working between checks.
One listed domain, fr4.sportplus.live, now loads a page announcing that it has been seized. Its main domain was among the pirate sports domains seized by United States authorities in July. Another, mgntv-nexon.xyz, points at an address belonging to the domain marketplace Sedo.
None of this changes the blocking. Google's resolver blocked 91 of the 118 domains on the day of the check and NordVPN's blocked 89, dead names included. Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 blocked none; it applies French orders through its content delivery network instead, an approach a Paris court accepted as a reasonable effort in September.
On 23 October two names on the list were free for anyone to register because they had expired: rktv.top, added in June, and ap-live.top, one of the six domains named in the court order itself. TorrentFreak registered both and put up a short page on each stating that it owns the domain for research and that it does not offer, link to or promote any streaming service.
From the Netherlands those pages load as expected. In France, Google's resolver refuses to resolve rktv.top. Its DNS response reads: "The requested domain is subject to a judicial injunction or other governmental blocking order for FR", and carries the extended error code 16, which the DNS standard labels "Censored".
Some French providers go further and redirect. Queried through Bouygues Telecom and Free, and through Completel, the answer was not a refusal but a different address, serving offrelegalesports.fr, a page that links visitors to licensed sports broadcasts. Orange's resolvers answered with the address of the user's own computer, or reported that the domain did not exist.
Most of the listed domains point to Hong Kong. Of the 118, 74 resolve to two addresses in a single range and return an unauthorised error, and another 19 point to a second range and show an identical page. Together that is 93 entries, which suggests the order is aimed at one or two streaming operations rather than a wide field.
France is preparing to go further. In July its parliament adopted a law allowing new domains to be added automatically during live broadcasts, with the regulator Arcom reviewing them afterwards. TorrentFreak reports no transparency layer attached to it.
The list is therefore doing something its own logic cannot easily describe. Four of the blocked domains lead nowhere at all. One carries an American seizure notice. One is listed for sale. Two publish a plain notice saying they belong to the reporter who compiled the list.
All of them remain blocked, because the test a resolver applies is not what a domain contains but whether it is on the list, and the only route on to the list is to have been on it already.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has looked for the exit and reports that there is none to find. Arcom publishes no blocking updates. The later notices omit the case number, so a search turns up only the first few. The full lists are released only to those who request them. TorrentFreak says it is not aware of any appeal process for a domain's owner.
Our analysts regard this as the system working as designed. The order protects tennis until 14 November, by which date the season it protects will have ended, and the domains that no longer exist will have been defended throughout.