Watch the video, transcript and sources
+ Court cut the ask: €580k to €1k a day
- Quad9 stops serving France Nov 24
- Google cleared Finnish forest firstLooking up an address is the most boring job on the internet. A French court put a daily penalty on a Swiss nonprofit over that job, and the nonprofit would rather leave the country. And the way Quad9 plans to switch France off has a twist in it. I will get to that at the end. A DNS resolver is the concierge who phones around for a website's number, then reads it back to you without asking your name. Quad9 runs one for free. It is a Swiss nonprofit foundation, its address is nine nine nine nine, and its protective setting refuses to look up known malware and phishing sites.
Quad9 says it will stop serving users in France on Tuesday, November twenty fourth. The trigger is a Paris court order about streams of women's tennis that the broadcaster beIN says infringe its rights. The order dates from May thirteenth. beIN holds the French rights to most of the women's tennis tour, and it asked the Paris court to make Google's resolver, the European Union's public resolver and Quad9 block a list of streaming sites until the last match of the season on November fourteenth. The list began with six domain names. The media regulator Arcom keeps adding names, and it now stands at fifty eight. Quad9 appealed, but the order applied while the appeal was pending. In June a court bailiff found two of the listed sites still opening through Quad9. In September beIN went back to the judge and asked for daily penalties. beIN's case is short. There is an order, there is a bailiff's report, and Quad9 chose not to act.
beIN asked for ten thousand euros a day for every listed domain still reachable. With fifty eight domains, that is five hundred eighty thousand euros a day. On October twenty first the judge set one thousand euros a day, in total, until the order ends on November fourteenth. Quad9 puts that at about twenty four thousand euros. In the ruling, the judge wrote that Quad9 owes reasonable efforts and says it makes none, and that this alone justifies a penalty. The judge also noted that Quad9 says it already filters dangerous domains for the whole world, so it had not shown that blocking for France was impossible. Two weeks earlier, the same Paris court refused beIN the same kind of penalty against Cloudflare and two VPN providers. They had each blocked some of the sites. Cloudflare blocked three of four, through its content network. NordVPN and Surfshark blocked six of eleven. The standard was reasonable effort, and Quad9 says its count is zero out of fifty eight.
Quad9's technical argument starts here. A lookup reaches the resolver as a name and a network address. There is no account behind it and no passport. To block only France, Quad9 says it would have to guess a country from that address using a location database, and it calls those databases incomplete and inaccurate. Germany taught Quad9 what a wrong guess costs. Quad9 says that when Sony Music sued there, it tried a location filter, and Sony reached the blocked content through a VPN. It says the court found it had not complied and fined it. It says it later won the case, after several years and six figures in costs. Blocking for everyone would satisfy the court, and Quad9 did that in Germany for a while. This time it says no, because a French order would then decide the lookups of people in every other country.
So Quad9 leaves instead. Its post lists networks it sees in France. They include the Prime Minister's digital directorate, the research network Renater and the electricity company EDF. They also include the railway, Institut Pasteur and Marseille's public hospitals. Quad9 says the list is a sample, and that network numbers are not strictly tied to a country. If you run servers or pipelines, search your configs for Quad9's addresses. The usual hiding places are routers, resolv dot conf and Docker daemons, plus CI runners and forwarders such as Pi-hole. Quad9 has not said how it will recognise French traffic, so pick a second resolver you trust before the twenty fourth. Quad9 argues that forcing a resolver to block a name is like holding a newspaper in front of a stadium to hide a concert, because people can switch to thousands of other open resolvers. Other resolvers have felt the same pressure. Cisco's OpenDNS left France in twenty twenty four, and in March Google, Cloudflare and Cisco lost appeals against earlier blocking orders.
Notice the dates. This order ends on November fourteenth, when the tennis season does, and Quad9 leaves ten days later. It says about twenty more French cases are waiting, and that it cannot survive the penalties from all of them. The appeal on the original order is still pending. Also today, a Finnish deadline lands for Google. The regulator ordered it to stop work at two planned data center sites by October twenty third. Google cleared about three hundred thirty hectares at one site and nearly two hundred at the other before the environmental assessments were finished. Google's Finland manager apologised, and the company says it acted in good faith. Now the twist I promised. On Hacker News, Quad9's CTO wrote that the company will probably use location filters to block French users after November twenty fourth. That is the method Quad9 says is unreliable. He accepts there may be errors, and says the point is to stay consistent about the answers it gives.
Verdict: NEEDS REVIEW — Search your configs for 9.9.9.9 before Nov 24. The court fight is unfinished.
Sources
https://quad9.net/news/blog/au-revoir-france/
https://quad9.net/fr/news/blog/au-revoir-france/
https://quad9.net/uploads/20261021_-_Jugement_selon_la_PAF.PDF
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50195959
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50200111
https://lobste.rs/s/s0aktw
https://librejustice.fr/decision/fr/PNVfFMulfC4G
https://legalplanet.pro/paris-2026-10-07-rg-26-11884-astreinte-fournisseurs-vpn-obligation-moyens-proportionnalite/
https://torrentfreak.com/vpns-and-cloudflare-escape-beins-e10000-a-day-piracy-blocking-penalties/
https://torrentfreak.com/dns-resolver-quad9-rejects-french-piracy-blocks-weighs-exit-as-bein-seeks-up-to-e580k-a-day/
https://torrentfreak.com/dns-resolver-quad9-will-leave-france-after-court-orders-piracy-blocking-penalty/
https://www.frandroid.com/culture-tech/3296569_quad9-coupe-son-dns-en-france-le-24-novembre-par-quoi-remplacer-9-9-9-9
https://next.ink/263502/dns-quad9-quitte-la-france-apres-avoir-ete-condamnee-face-a-bein-pour-defaut-de-blocage/
https://www.01net.com/actualites/quad9-le-resolveur-dns-annonce-quitter-la-france.html
https://www.macg.co/ailleurs/2026/10/dns-apres-sa-condamnation-face-a-bein-sports-quad9-refuse-de-filtrer-et-quitte-la-france-311835
https://www.linforme.com/tech-telecom/article/piratage-sportif-quad9-ecope-d-une-astreinte-pour-defaut-de-blocage_11978.html
https://www.clubic.com/actualite-632734-quad9-refuse-les-blocages-anti-piratage-en-france-et-menace-de-partir-face-a-une-amende-record.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvj6jkx6g1r0o
https://yle.fi/a/74-20251367
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/oct/22/finland-google-felling-trees-datacentre
And that's the diff for today. I'm Niko from Axrisi. Merge responsibly.
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