Quad9, the Swiss nonprofit DNS resolver, says it will stop serving users in France on 24 November 2026. The trigger was a French judgment, which Quad9 dates to 21 October, in a case brought by the sports broadcaster beIN. It orders Quad9 to block recursive DNS resolution of a set of domain names for users located in France. Quad9 says about 20 further suits against it and other resolver operators seek similar orders covering hundreds of names. The details of this order show a design problem that reaches well beyond one service.
The strongest case for the order
The argument for blocking is serious. Live sports rights are among the most valuable content in media, and the value is perishable. A pirate stream that stays up for a Saturday match does most of its damage within hours. Rightsholders say they should not have to chase mirror sites one at a time while any intermediary able to cut access stays exempt. Courts across Europe have accepted that access providers can be ordered to block, and a resolver is one more link in the chain. If the infringement is real and the rightsholder has gone through a court, why should the resolver be exempt?
That case holds for a French ISP. It holds up less well for a resolver that has no French customers on file.
The jurisdiction problem is technical, not rhetorical
The order requires blocking only for users in France. Quad9 says it cannot do that reliably. In its announcement, it says it has "no database of users associating them with jurisdictions" and keeps no records of its users. The only alternative it sees is adding the domains to its global malicious-domain database. That would apply French law to every user of its main service worldwide, which Quad9 calls "extraterritorial."
Quad9 also points to a German precedent. It says Sony Music used a VPN from Germany to reach domains Quad9 had geo-blocked. A court then found Quad9 non-compliant and fined it. Quad9 later won that dispute on appeal. Its account of the December 2023 Dresden Higher Regional Court ruling says the court held that resolver operators enjoy liability privileges as access providers. It also says the court found the claimant had not done enough to pursue the hosting company first. That account comes from Quad9, a party to the case, and Quad9 says winning took several years and six-figure costs.
The lesson is that a geo-limited order puts the burden of proof on the resolver. Any user who connects through a VPN or tunnel can make the resolver look non-compliant, and a non-compliance finding carries a penalty.
Proportionality is where the order fails
The penalty figures show the stakes. Quad9 says beIN sought up to €580,000 per day, and that the court reduced the daily penalty to €1,000. TorrentFreak reported earlier that beIN's ask was €10,000 per domain per day, and that an earlier Paris order had grown from six domains to 58 after updates. A €1,000 daily penalty is survivable for one case. Quad9 argues that it "cannot survive the accumulation of penalties yet to be assessed in 20 other pending cases." A nonprofit has no revenue to absorb that. A rule that only well-funded firms can meet is a barrier to entry, whatever its intent.
The EU framework already points toward restraint. The Digital Services Act preserves the possibility of judicial orders to terminate or prevent an infringement. It also bars general monitoring obligations, and its Recital 120 says an access-restriction order should be addressed "in principle" to a provider such as the hosting service provider, internet service provider or domain registry or registrar. Quad9 argues that the Dresden court's subsidiarity logic (go after the source first) applies here too. I have not confirmed the legal basis of the French order, because the judgment text was not machine-readable and the announcement cites no statute. I therefore do not claim the order breaches EU law. The policy point is narrower: the DSA's hierarchy puts upstream actors first, and a resolver is about as far from the infringing content as an intermediary can be.
The block will not work as intended
The Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that Quad9's departure "will not remove any allegedly infringing material from the internet." Users can point their devices at another resolver. The likely effect is that French users who valued Quad9's filtering of malware and phishing domains lose that protection, and the pirate sites stay reachable. France has seen this before. TorrentFreak reports that Cisco's OpenDNS withdrew from France in June 2024 after an order obtained by Canal+, though I did not verify that against a primary source. French users have now lost a security service while piracy is unaffected.
What proportionate policy looks like
None of this means rightsholders should be left without remedies. A narrower regime is feasible:
- Source first. Require rightsholders to show they pursued the host, registrar or operator before ordering a resolver, as the Dresden court reportedly did.
- Bound the order to what a resolver can do. Specify technical measures and avoid defining compliance by the user's location when the resolver cannot establish it.
- Cap cumulative penalties for nonprofit and privacy-by-design services, so that 20 parallel cases cannot multiply exposure beyond what any single court weighed.
- Keep review fast. Wrongful blocks cost far more than a delayed one, so appeals on blocking orders should be heard quickly.
Quad9 says an appeal is pending, which leaves room for a French appellate court to set limits. Until then, the practical result is that a service built to protect users leaves a large market, and the content stays online. A rule that removes the safest option while leaving the target in place does not serve rightsholders, users or the open internet.