Quad9 to Leave France After Refusing a Court Order to Block Domains

Quad9, the Swiss public-benefit foundation that runs a free, privacy-focused DNS resolver, has announced it will cease service for users in France on November 24, 2026. The trigger is a lost case against beIN, in which a French court ordered the resolver to block recursive resolution of a set of domain names for French users.

The dispute

beIN — a Qatari company with offices in France — sought to force Quad9 to block domains it claims infringe its rights to sports broadcasts. Quad9 has no connection to those domains or the sites' operators, yet the court held the resolver liable. The financial penalty was reduced from €580,000 to €1,000 per day, but for Quad9 the matter was never about money — it is a question of principle.

The organization regards recursive DNS resolution as a neutral, passive service and refuses to alter the answers it returns. It also calls compliance technically impossible: the service is free, requires no sign-up, and keeps no database of users, so there is no reliable way to tell which clients are in France.

Why there is no middle ground

Global blocking of the disputed domains would extend a French ruling to the entire world for the commercial benefit of one private company — a precedent Quad9 finds unacceptable. GeoIP blocking is also ruled out: in a similar German case against Sony Music (2021–2023), the plaintiff circumvented such blocking via a VPN, and Quad9 was fined for non-compliance. It eventually won that case, but at the cost of years and a six-figure sum.

Quad9 argues the measures are futile: the pirated content stays live on its servers, and users will simply switch to one of thousands of other, often less trustworthy, open resolvers. It likens the effort to holding up a sheet of newspaper to block a whole stadium's view of a concert.

The fallout

Among the French networks using Quad9 are government agencies, research institutes, hospitals, utilities and universities. All of them will lose the cyberthreat protection the service has provided for nearly nine years once it withdraws on November 24.

Roughly twenty similar lawsuits are pending against Quad9 in France, and it fears they will escalate. An appeal has been filed; Quad9 vows to keep defending its position in court and urges French citizens to contact the regulator ARCOM and their legislators, insisting that "looking up names is not a criminal offense."

Source: Hacker News