Quad9 leaves France over DNS blocking order

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d type: a DNS resolver is leaving a G7 country because a sports broadcaster asked a judge nicely. Quad9 leaves France on November 24, 2026, and if you’re one of the many people (or hospitals, or ISPs, or ministries) pointing your devices at 9.9.9.9, you’ve got about a month to find a new home.

Let me rewind, because the story is almost too absurd to be real.

Why Quad9 leaves France instead of blocking

Quad9 is a Swiss non-profit that runs a free, privacy-respecting DNS resolver with built-in malware filtering. No account, no logging of your IP, nothing to sell. It’s the kind of infrastructure the internet quietly runs on while nobody says thank you.

Then beIN Sports showed up at the Paris Judicial Court. The Qatari broadcaster wanted Quad9 to block a list of domains that pirate football streams, and it wanted teeth: penalties of up to €580,000 per day, or €10,000 per day per domain still resolvable. The judge wasn’t quite that generous. The final figure landed at €1,000 a day, applied to a blocking order from May that has since ballooned to 58 domains. Quad9 does the math at roughly €24,000 by the time the measures expire mid-November, not counting lawyers.

Small change for beIN. A real problem for a foundation that runs on donations, especially with about twenty similar lawsuits queued up in French courts. Quad9 put it plainly: it “cannot survive” penalties stacking across all of them.

So what did they do about the 58 domains? Nothing. Not one block. They told the court as much.

The problem with “just block it for the French”

You might be thinking: come on, just geo-fence France and move on. Quad9’s answer is that there’s no reliable way to know who’s French. Their service has no sign-up, and IP geolocation is a guess dressed up as a fact. The alternative, blocking those domains for every user on Earth because a Paris court said so, is something they refuse on principle:

“We categorically refuse to alter or lie to you about the DNS responses you receive in a way that opposes your expectations.”

Hence the nuclear option. Rather than lie to everyone or pay forever, Quad9 will make its “cybersecurity protection and general services unavailable to French users” from Tuesday, November 24. How exactly they’ll cut the cord hasn’t been decided yet; they admit every method is imperfect. An appeal is pending, but they’re not waiting on it.

And here’s the bit that makes me grind my teeth: DNS blocking doesn’t even work. Any pirate with a pulse switches resolver in ten seconds. Meanwhile the collateral damage is a whole country losing a free malware filter. Cloudflare and a handful of VPN providers, who did block at least some domains, saw their penalty requests tossed out in October. Quad9 held the line and got hit. OpenDNS already pulled out of France in 2024 over a Canal+ order. Spot the pattern.

What you should do before November 24

If you’re in France and you’ve ever typed 9.9.9.9 or 149.112.112.112 into a router, a Pi-hole, a phone, or a corporate DHCP server, go change it now. Not in November. Now. Quad9 itself hopes “30 days will be sufficient time for conversion” and openly worries that plenty of people won’t get the memo until their lookups start failing.

Where to go? Quad9 doesn’t name a successor and is pretty sniffy about the other free resolvers. My take: your ISP’s resolver will obey the same court orders, Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 already blocks some domains in France, and Google’s 8.8.8.8 is, well, Google. If you care about the filtering you’re losing, running your own resolver (Unbound on a cheap box) with a blocklist is the honest replacement. If you just want things to work, pick any of the big ones and accept the trade-off.

Quad9 also asks French users to write to their MPs and to ARCOM, because the real fix isn’t technical. We’ve seen the same regulatory reflexes before in the SecNumCloud saga: France loves sovereign infrastructure right up until it has to coexist with how the internet actually works.

A country just lost a free security service to protect Saturday’s match. Goal, I suppose.

Source: TorrentFreak — https://torrentfreak.com/dns-resolver-quad9-will-leave-france-after-court-orders-piracy-blocking-penalty/ (Quad9’s own announcement: quad9.net)
Image: Brett Sayles / Pexels