A Swiss non-profit that declined to block 58 pirate sports-streaming domains for French internet users will stop serving French internet users altogether.
Quad9, a public DNS resolver operated by a Swiss foundation, will end its service in France on 24 November. The decision follows a ruling by the Paris Judicial Court, reported by TorrentFreak.
beIN Sports had sought penalties of up to 580,000 euros a day, calculated at 10,000 euros per day for every domain that remained reachable through Quad9. The court set the figure at 1,000 euros a day in total, running until the blocking measures expire on 14 November. Quad9 puts the bill at 24,000 euros, not counting its own legal costs.
The order itself requires Quad9 to implement a blocking order issued in May, since expanded to 58 domain names. The foundation says it understands that it is now subject to the penalty, because it will not block the domains before the order ends.
In its ruling the court pointed to Quad9's own statements. By the court's reading, Quad9 was obliged to make reasonable efforts to block the domains and chose to take no action at all.
That is a different outcome from the one the same court reached earlier this month, when it refused beIN's penalty requests against Cloudflare and several VPN providers. Those companies had blocked at least some of the domains, which the court treated as a reasonable effort. Canal+ lost a comparable request against Cloudflare in September.
Quad9's objection is to the practice rather than the bill. "We categorically refuse to alter or lie to you about the DNS responses you receive in a way that opposes your expectations," the foundation says.
There is a technical obstacle as well. Quad9 says it cannot block accurately for French users alone: the service is free, requires no sign-up, and offers no reliable way to tell which users are in France. Blocking the domains for everyone in the world would satisfy the court, the foundation confirms, but it refuses to apply a French order to the global internet.
How it will withdraw from France has not been settled; the foundation says it is still weighing options and believes all of them imperfect. It also argues that blocking would achieve little, since users can switch to any of thousands of other open resolvers. "This is like holding a piece of newspaper in front of a stadium full of people to block the view of a concert," it says.
The departure is not about this case alone. Roughly 20 other blocking cases are pending in France. "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," the foundation says, adding: "Once the tools of censorship are built, they are rarely used sparingly or justly." OpenDNS suspended its French service in 2024 after a Canal+ order. An appeal against the present ruling, docketed RG 26/11882, is pending.
It is worth being exact about what the withdrawal achieves. From 24 November, the number of those 58 domains that a French user can resolve through Quad9 will be nil.
Measured the way the court measures these things, that is not partial compliance but total. Cloudflare and the VPN providers blocked some of the domains and were found to have made a reasonable effort. Quad9 will block all of them, continuously, for everybody in France, by not being there.
The logic extends in both directions. A resolver that answers nothing resolves nothing, so the most thorough blocking available to a court is an order its subject cannot comply with, and the most thorough compliance available to a resolver is to stop resolving.
The dates are tidier still. The penalty runs to 14 November and the service ends on 24 November, which gives ten days in which Quad9 will be present in France, in breach, and paying. From the eleventh day it will be in complete compliance with an order that has expired.
The Department of Unnecessary Research records the outcome as a success for all parties. On 24 November the order will be satisfied in full, by a resolver that is not there, on behalf of users who have gone somewhere else.