A Belgian court has upheld an order requiring the operators of public DNS resolvers to block pirate sports streaming domains, rejecting the core of a challenge brought by Google, Cloudflare and Cisco.
The ruling was handed down on 20 August by the President of the French-speaking Business Court of Brussels. The order itself has not been published, but a new implementation decision from Belgium's anti-piracy department summarises the outcome and sets out how the blockade will work in practice.
Belgium came late to site blocking, but has moved quickly since a dedicated anti-piracy department opened. The first order under the new regime, obtained by the sports rightsholder DAZN in April 2025, went further than most: alongside major internet service providers, it required Cloudflare, Google and Cisco to stop resolving pirate streaming domains through their public DNS services, under threat of fines of 100,000 euros a day.
Cisco responded by pulling its OpenDNS service out of Belgium entirely. Google and Cloudflare complied in their own ways. All three companies challenged the order, and in July 2025 the court suspended the DNS blocking requirement against Cisco pending a final ruling, after which OpenDNS returned to the country and further DNS blocking orders were put on hold.
That final ruling has now gone against the resolvers. According to the implementation decision, the court found that it is technically possible for alternative DNS resolvers to block domains, and that the companies had not shown the costs would be disproportionate. Concerns that some users near the border could be caught by geolocation errors did not change the outcome.
"Imposing a blocking measure on the main alternative DNS resolution service providers helps strengthen the effectiveness of the blocking injunction imposed on ISPs, which is regarded as a relevant measure," the decision reads. It adds that the combination of measures "is intended to discourage users seeking access to unlawful content, as their experience as consumers of football matches, which they are very attached to watching live, will be disrupted".
The DNS providers did win some concessions. A requirement to redirect users to a warning page was scrapped, on the basis that it cannot be imposed on resolvers. The 100,000 euro daily penalty now applies only on days when DAZN matches are broadcast live, subject to a maximum of 20 million euros per company, and does not apply to under-blocking caused by "an exceptional geolocation error".
The mechanics are unusually precise. The order covers Belgian football competitions, including the Jupiler Pro League. DAZN may submit one blocklist update a week, with a maximum of 100 new domains. There is no fixed schedule: DAZN tells the anti-piracy department which matchday it wants the list updated for at least seven working days in advance, and the resolvers then have five working days to implement the changes. The list has grown from 58 domains to 258 since the order was first issued.
The blockade itself is intermittent. It is switched on 90 minutes before a match begins, and the implementation order explains why. "It is also with this effectiveness of the blocking measure in mind that it was decided that it should operate intermittently, and that it should only be implemented one and a half hours before the start of matches," it reads. "In this way, users find it more difficult to anticipate the blocking and plan around it in advance."
Cisco told the department it will again withdraw OpenDNS from Belgium rather than comply, arguing that the public DNS system "does not allow for the implementation of selective, geolocated and dynamic blocking as required by the order" and that enabling it "would compromise the performance, stability and security of that service". Withdrawal is the only concrete measure the company says it is "technically able" to implement, and the anti-piracy department has accepted it as compliance. Cisco intends to appeal, and told TorrentFreak that "OpenDNS currently remains available in Belgium".
The resolvers have three months to put the blocking in place. Unless the appeal succeeds, OpenDNS users in Belgium can expect the service to go dark for a second time later this year.
It is the timing that deserves closer attention. The order's reasoning does not rest only on making pirate domains unreachable. It rests on making them unreachable at a moment the viewer has not foreseen.
This is a robust finding, provided that nobody involved knows when the football starts.
Every other element of the schedule is a matter of record. DAZN nominates the matchday seven working days ahead. The resolvers are given five working days to load the list. Kick-off times are published weeks in advance, printed in fixture lists and sold to the public as tickets.
The unpredictable component is therefore the 90 minutes. To defeat the measure, a viewer would need to establish, in advance, the precise moment at which a nationally televised football match is due to begin. Our analysts have modelled this and consider it achievable.
The Department of Unnecessary Research notes the deeper elegance of the design. Because the blockade is intermittent, it is absent for almost the entire week, which is exactly when nobody wants to watch the match, and present only when the match is on, which is exactly when everybody expects it. The Jupiler Pro League fixture list has not yet been classified as a circumvention tool.