Quad9 (DNS Resolver) to Exit France

Quad9, a Swiss nonprofit recursive DNS resolver, will stop providing its free cyberprotection service in France on November 24, 2026 after a French court ordered it to block DNS resolution for domains accused by beIN of facilitating audiovisual copyright infringement. The court reduced an initial penalty from €580,000 to €1,000 per day, but Quad9 refuses to comply on principle and technical grounds: the service keeps no user-identifying records and cannot reliably map users to jurisdictions, so implementing the ordered blocking would require either global blocking that applies French law worldwide or intrusive measures that violate privacy and the neutrality of DNS. Global blocking would satisfy the judgment but would extraterritorially impose a private company’s commercial claims on all users; geoIP-based workarounds proved legally and technically flawed in a prior German case with Sony, which led to fines and costly litigation.

Quad9 argues that DNS blocking does not remove infringing content and will simply push users to less trustworthy resolvers, while creating dangerous precedents for censorship and cross-border legal overreach. About 20 similar lawsuits in France seek blocking of hundreds of names, creating unsustainable legal and financial exposure. To avoid undermining privacy, security, and DNS integrity, Quad9 will withdraw services in France, acknowledging that French users will lose its protections but refusing to become an instrument of extraterritorial or opaque content control.