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Keep up the good fight! I'm happy that you take a stand for your beliefs and try to do what's best for all of us.

Thanks for fighting this.

I wonder how much longer the internet will manage to hold out. Governments will continue trying to impose their laws on it, causing the international network to degenerate to numerous national networks with heavy filtering at the borders. It's really sad to watch...

If you have no presence in France do you need to care about the ruling or the fines?

Thank you for the explanation! I couldn't agree more with your stance, and I appreciate deeply you fighting to maintain your (correct) principles. You've gained at least one fan and new user today.

One can only hope the tribunal that rendered this ridiculous decision is one of the organizations that lose DNS access on November 24.

Honest question here: why don't they target the operators for the nameservers that own the affected domain, basically the TLDs?

Oh right, the blocked domain is probably not a french TLD...

Quick question: what would happen if you decided to simply shield yourself from France’s action without applying any change to your dns? Or is blocking french users considered a compliant answer by French courts?

I don’t get why you would still need to block french users if you also need to exit the jurisdiction.

Unrelated but hoping you could answer this:

There was a rumour years ago that Quad9 was connected to UK intelligence, or something like that. I haven't heard anyone discuss there for a long time, but wondering if you (or anyone reading this) can comment on the source of the rumours and whether there is any veracity to them.

I’m sorry for being so dense, so what do you plan to do?

It sounds like selectivd site blocking is against your mission, so will you then just not offer Quad9 to any person in France instead (total blackout across all sites)?

Sorry if I’m missing the obvious or your stated solution.

Sorry that you guys have to go through this. I use quad9 and it works great!

Better than geoip, y'all could work with the French to have French networks point to a black hole server by having BGP point 9.9.9.9 at said server.

I asked his elsewhere but aren't there like a prepondeance of existing case law or amicus-briefs that would speak to the logical and historical stupidity of arguments by the plaintiffs?

So, basically, you admit you will comply exiting all countries that ask for it; Pushing users to allegedly less safe resolvers in the name of security and integrity; And eventually ending the service in a couple of years because no one will be able to use your service since you'll be blocking most parts of the world and won't work without VPN exit in specific places. The decision is understandable, this really is a dillema I wouldn't want to take part in. You'll die by a thousand cuts of authoritarianism.

It's strange that Quad9 openly does malicious domain filtering [1] using what it terms "threat intelligence feeds", but apparently filtering piracy domains is technically impossible and not the right place for this to happen. I think courts rightly are suspicious of this kind of doublespeak from DNS companies. If DNS filtering is effective for protection against malware and ransomware, it will be at least somewhat effective for piracy filtering too.

[1] https://quad9.net/service/threat-blocking/

The article rightfully mentions the Sony case, but the article is actually mainly about another company:

> beIN, a Qatari company with offices in France, previously sought to force Quad9 to block resolution for a set of domain names they assert are participating in copyright infringement of its audiovisual rights on sports event broadcasts.

This seems to be the relevant wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIN_Channels_Network

> Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.

Isnt this what gets all tech companies into trouble all the time. Something objectionable happens (ChatGPT helping someone bulid a bomb for instance) and we go like "Do better".

I'm confused; how does the geoIP block they implemented in Germany differ from the planned end of service for French users?

Lately Sony Corpos have been really getting into their supervillain arc aren’t they?

> I wish I could even suggest what someone could do against these trolls.

While trolls are awful, something like trolls can always exist in a free society. The root problem here is the French courts enabling the trolls with unworkable rulings. Both the French and Italian justice systems have a history of making some clueless and even incoherent rulings which are never corrected.

I wait for Netflix (and other streaming services) to be fined due to their users accessing content that shouldn't be available in a certain territory via a VPN.

And for contempt of court nonetheless. That's meant for when you blatantly don't do the thing the court told you to do, not when you did it but it didn't work how the court wanted.

Rare Cisco W lol

Same reason copyright abusers threaten people that help remove the DRM from their Amazon-bought e-book so it can be read on their non-Amazon bought e-reader with a $250,000 fine and five years in prison for circumventing a digital lock using DMCA, because it's what the legal API allows them to achieve their end goal.

It's not about if it makes sense from a moral point of view.

The most likely answer is that they didn't think about it or didn't understand or didn't care. But on the off chance they did, perhaps they thought the DNS provider would enforce the ruling worldwide.

It shows maliciousness (we can bully this smaller player for a win) and/or total incompetence (we don't even understand how internet works, but we'll issue rulings anyway).

The same method is used to block sites that don't respect the decisions the French people have made regarding the limits of the freedom of speech (no hate speech, no terrorist proselytism, no pedo, etc.).

Granted, that's the theory.

When the demands come from a company on the basis of copyright/intellectual property (that is, exclusive broadcasting rights), one can feel less comfortable about this affair; even thought the judgement mentions that the case is backed by the ARCOM, the french authority for broadcasting, which should instead IMHO deal with a couple or two of private TV channels that are obvious vectors of fake news.

But, this is the same copyright that can protect you when you publish programs, source code, images, etc., even when you use a free and open license; the licence has meaning thanks to the copyright.

It is actually worse than that. This amounts to punishing someone for looking up a phone number in a phone book that someone else published.

Because they can.

Attacking the people doing the actual bad things is hard, attacking a single unified organization is easy.

Because they've already got the ISPs DNS resolvers blocking shit and when they see clients from those same ISPs still connecting they get hints on which public DNS resolvers people are using. You can make a safe bet French ISPs played an active part in pointing people to go after quad 9.

Sue the government for providing the road that criminals walk on!

If phone book publishing were regulated in a way that paid content on the internet is regulated, then absolutely yes. Not only that, people who mention the existence of phone books as means to obtain phone numbers, and people developing software capable of storing phone numbers, would be threatened and harassed too, as enablers of criminal activity. Copyright leeches have enough money to buy laws favorable to them. Which, also, gives them more money to buy even more laws favorable to them. It doesn't have to make sense for you because it's not designed to serve your interests.

You would if you could and it'd probably work.

I believe the position of the French government is that anyone in the path of a crime can be ordered to block the part of the crime that relates to them, without having any liability for the crime. So quad9 are not criminals for not blocking pirate sites, but still have to block specific sites when ordered.

Keep resolving, but instead of resolving multiple A records, resolve just one. Fuck that one server in particular.

Delay updates by 1 week.

Answer randomly with the up-to-date or the out-of-date records.

While I agree in spirit, this also makes the resolver away from being able to claim they're just a neutral service which just delivers existing records without being opinionated

Obviously

The problem is that these types of companies are started by naive idealistic techs who only know how to play by the rules and can't figure out why people would misuse their products

They were very well described by the "rubber hose crypto" XKCD

(Not that I don't think a DNS company stays at the same level of complexity - both legal and technological - as a VPN company, but still)

Redirect porn websites domains to them.

This would hurt their users by making their DNS services less useful than competitors.

Hopefully the leadership of public resolvers isn't as a childish as you are.

That kind of action would penalize their users far more than it would hurt the evil corporation that slighted them. Not to mention they'd lose users. People who choose quad9 likely aren't too keen with DNS tempering.

But yeah, take that sony-or-whatever!

France is not doing anything. This is BIG SOCCER suing the hell of everyone.

They're removing all presence they have in France, their servers mostly.

They want to be out of reach of French courts basically.

Reply in separate thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50200111

You stop serving anything for french ips. Its like you dont exist.

> Yet, they were still ordered to block the content.

At first yes, but ultimately the blocking order was undone by a higher German court in December 2023.

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568579

It’s still happening every time there is football, at least they now seem to lift the block when the games end, when this started sometimes they took 12 hours after the game ended.

I don't see the relation and want to laugh with you guys. ISPs blocked cloudflare during football matches? Or the government websites directly? why?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/judge-rules-ever...

Host in Switzerland, that's where Quad9 operates from.

Also, hosting location is kind of a deception for real ways to protect data, like E2EE, which work no matter the country.

The US doesn't compel ISPs to block websites. The FBI will occasionally seize a domain after a court order, but that's it.

This is a pretty uniquely EU thing.

At least in the US, it’s not a matter of "understanding". It’s a matter of "you are paid to misunderstand".

The law is vast and subject to various levels of interpretation. If there’s anything I have learned is that the court is just a rich persons weapon to "peacefully" resolve problems. In this modern capitalistic, greedy shithole we have dug ourselves into. Money and resources talks.

Sports is the only thing left of value in broadcasting. I can totally understand why they're gonna fight tooth and nail to protect it.

DNS needs a way to say “unavailable for legal reasons” so your system just picks a different resolver or resolves recursively.

> Time to boycott Sony, they deserve no money from anyone, and I meant anyone.

Because when they installed rootkits on user's machines wasn't that time?

Because when they removed content users purchased from their machines wasn't that time?

Because when they spy on what users watch on their TVs in the privacy of their home wasn't that time?

Sony is like a tree. The best time to boycott Sony was decades ago. The second best time is today.

Why are so many comments talking about Sony? The case was brought by beIN Sports.

Yes, but in this case the plaintiff is beIN SPORTS France.

Read the article, it’s not Sony it’s Bein the ones who have the soccer broadcast rights.

FOSS depends on copyright laws. Oldest versions of Linux and UNIX are more than 20 years old, so early versions of both would be hypothetically now in public domain in the absence of Disney-lobbied maximalist versions of copyright laws, or in the total absence of one.

There was a recent attempt to substantially reform copyright in the EU - it was called "Stop Killing Games". It gathered over one million signatures, forcing the EU parliament to consider it. Their response was "this would require us to change copyright law, and we can't do that, sorry."

The USA strong-arms copyright law into every single trade deal. I think it was Chile who tried to strike DMCA 1201 out of some trade deal with the US about food staples, but were swiftly informed by the US that if they didn't make DMCA 1201 into Chilean domestic law, the US would completely cut off their trade. This stuff is serious business for the US and no other country is in the geopolitical position right now to question it.

Fortunately since the US is mid-collapse that last point may change soon.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/28/disenshittification-natio...

How do you feel about OpenAI training on all of the books in the world.

because people have been successfully propagandised into believing it to be necessary or good. of course they argue for it without any evidence.

> How have our democracies not abolished copyright law yet? These laws only serve the 1%.

I don't think that claim is true, personally. But if we grant it for the sake of argument, it should be completely unsurprising that copyright hasn't been abolished. Governments primarily serve the powerful and wealthy, not the common man.

> How have our democracies not abolished copyright law yet? These laws only serve the 1%

Yeah, fuck those billionaire authors and artists in coffee shops not wanting people to rip off the books and art they create without compensation.

> Does the fact I have written this resolver make me liable should it not block the domains they listed which may contain copyright infringing content?

I use unbound and have a similar question. Shouldn't we just encourage everyone to run their own resolvers (it's turnkey for the most part!)? Will Sony/beIn start going after the root servers and enforce a global block?

>Will these copyright enforcers now go after Google for 8.8.8.8? Cloudflare for 1.1.1.1?

they already have.

Macron's party has also been trying to require encryption backdoors for years, and are major supporters of Chat Control.

Can you tell more? Which apps?

As long as you don’t say Artificial Intelligence instead of Super Intelligence, you’re all good.

US just pushes the enforcement mechanisms to private companies not so hamstrung by legalese. E.g. try and torrent all you want. After all, all you are really doing observably is connecting to various IPs, essentially no different than browsing websites. But you might get a letter in the mail not from the government, but from the ISP threatening legal action against you, solely because their systems saw your IP connected to another.

These days you can land in jail for simply bad mouthing the government. US needs to strengthen its adherence to their constitutions. Words on paper are useless if they aren't followed.

> demonstrated by our courts, did they do it at behest of Qatar

Honestly, this is a possibility.

beIN, like any Qatar based company, is majority owned by the state. Qatar is infamously rich in oil with the state able to subsidize luxury lifestyles for citizens it deems worthy.

France needs oil, like any other country. So if a journalist could follow the money. Could probably find where the pressure was applied within the government.

The rich using archaic copyright laws to get their way has been modus operandi for quite awhile. Seen this applied both in USA and abroad.

It is difficult to envision a "non-recursive DNS resolver" in public service. Recursion is the usual and customary way that DNS names are resolved by the leaf servers, because they are not authoritative for much of anything.

The most common configuration for non-recursive DNS servers is with forwarders. The DNS server accepts queries and simply forwards all of them upstream to another resolver, which... makes its own recursive queries.

It is simply not feasible to avoid having recursive resolvers in the chain of lookups. That's how things work with DNS.

I recommend Norway, they have lovely fjords.

You keep using it. They're not going to block your IP but response times may drop since they won't have any servers in France.

DNSCrypt or RethinkDNS (the resolver, not the app, although the app is awesome as well)

Sam Ellis of SearchParty just did a video on UAE on the same premise: they own ManCity F.C. and have considerable influence over the UK government. The current UK prime minister also happens to be the former mayor of Manchester.

video link: https://youtu.be/fUrNOVjWUVM?si=koBbVj67CxfMhncC (skip ahead to the second half of the video).

French law does not care if the servers are in France or anywhere else - just that the users are in France. This sounds unexpected, but that is the law. There is a treaty called the "Lugano Convention" that allows civil lawsuits to be extended across borders of the member nations in events like this - France and Switzerland (where Quad9 is based) are signatories on that convention, so effectively French law can apply in Switzerland on matters involving internet activity. It is much more nuanced than that, so forgive this short summary, but removing servers from France is not sufficient.

Most likely, so they have legal standing to say "We don't operate in your country or serve your citizens, your laws do not apply". Also, punishment for a stupid ruling.

They don't have to. Despite Europe's best efforts, national laws are not enforceable outside the borders without lots of cooperation, and tech regulation is not an area where people are collaborating.

> Am I the only one who find it disturbing that a privacy focused service publishes a detailed report of which institutions is accessing their service

I don't find it disturbing at all, and it's perfectly in line with what you would expect a privacy focused service to do: name and shame those that are attacking privacy.

What's with all the Sony comments? This has nothing to do with Sony.

> that failed state

Aren't literally every country doing the same?

I guess the issue is that they are ordered to block it for all users, not only those particular users who picked some particular lists.

And nobody would pick a piracy list, why'd you do it as a user.

4chan has a privilege of being based in the USA.

Yeah, I’m really mixed on this story. Why are they so insistent on not just blocking the sites? I don’t even really think a slippery slope is at play here. This is a very specific legal circumstance that doesn’t seem to have any chance of expanding to other forms of censorship.

Quad9 already states that they strongly oppose piracy, so just block the sites. The piracy sites will be fine.

I don’t think DNS is as neutral as Quad9 believes it is. DNS is like the sign for a business on the road and the domain registrar is like the building permit you get to build the sign. DNS is a way to find a website or business without even bothering with a search engine. Try typing in stamps.com, office.com, booking.com, weather.com.

Per each infraction. They said they currently have 20 other cases pending. And who knows how many would be to come.

What exactly are you trying to convey here? That this penalty is not an issue? Would you be willing to pay it from your pocket then? Quad9 is not Cloudflare nor Google. It's a nonprofit, in case you blinked right at the sentence that mentioned this.

I think the sympathies to this story would change a lot if Quad9 was refusing to block DNS resolution to websites for other illegal organizations like human trafficking rings, cartels, gangs, etc.

Copyright infringement isn’t exactly a violent crime but it is very clearly a crime.

What I don’t think Quad9 realizes is that being neutral from a technical and architectural basis is meaningless in law and doesn’t reflect your intent. If you have awareness and means to make a change that mitigates harm and you refuse, that’s how you lose cases.

I think it can be very easily argued by a lawyer that Quad9 intended to keep the infringing content easily available and at best minimally comply.