Quad9 will stop serving French users after Paris court penalty
in plain words
Quad9 is a free public service that helps computers find websites. A court in Paris said it must block some piracy websites or pay a fine each day. Quad9 decided to stop offering its service to people in France instead.
Full summary
Quad9, a Swiss non-profit foundation that runs a resolver The DNS server that looks up domain names on behalf of users. Full definition of resolver, has decided to stop offering its services to users in France from November 24. The decision follows a ruling by the Paris Judicial Court, which went against the foundation in a case brought by beIN Sports.
beIN Sports had asked for penalties of up to €580,000 a day after Quad9 chose not to block pirate tennis streams. The court instead ordered Quad9 to carry out an earlier May blocking order, which has since grown to cover 58 domain name A readable internet name made of labels separated by dots. Full definition of domain name, or pay €1,000 a day in total until the blocking measures end on November 14. Quad9 calculates that this adds up to €24,000, not counting its own legal costs. Quad9 says it understands it is now subject to the penalty because it has not blocked the domains. The court referred to Quad9’s own statements and found that it had made no effort at all to block them.
The court had reached a different outcome 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 considered a reasonable effort. Canal+ also lost a similar penalty request against Cloudflare in September.
Quad9 says it sees recursive DNS Domain Name System The internet's directory that links domain names to computer addresses. Full definition of DNS resolution as a neutral service and does not want to change it. It states that it refuses to alter DNS responses in ways that users would not expect. The foundation also says it cannot accurately block domains for French users only, because its free service requires no sign-up and there is no reliable way to tell which users are in France. Blocking for all users would satisfy the court, Quad9 confirms, but it refuses to apply a French court order to internet users worldwide. Quad9 has not yet decided how it will stop serving French users and says all of its options are imperfect.
Quad9 also argues that blocking would not help much, because people can switch to one of the many other open DNS resolvers. The foundation notes that about 20 other blocking cases are pending in France and expects many of them to lead to more pressure and potential fines. Quad9 says it cannot survive the accumulation of those penalties. OpenDNS suspended its service in France in 2024 in response to a Canal+ blocking order.
An appeal is pending, and Quad9 says it will continue to oppose court-ordered DNS blocking. French users have until November 24 to switch to another DNS resolver.