Quad9 planned shutdown in France

On October 22nd, 2026, Quad9, a recursive DNS resolver, announced the suspension of its service for all of its users in France due to a court ruling^[1]. The suspension is planned to take effect on November 24th, 2026. It is similar to another case that happened around December 2024: LaLiga forces Spanish ISPs to mass-block Cloudflare IPs during Soccer Games.

Quad9 was established in 2016 as a non-profit foundation by several entities as a privacy and security first recursive DNS resolver, aiming at combatting malware and phishing.^[2] Quad9 being recursive, it does not use any other public DNS service to retrieve IP addresses, and instead traces the IP down to the authoritative name servers^[3]. This means that the service must implement domain blocks all by itself, but it also means it is highly independent, making it resilient to typical DNS phishing attacks and the likes.

On May 13th, 2026, France's Court of Cassation, one of the country's supreme courts, ordered, on behalf of beIN Sports France, Google, DNS4EU and Quad9 to block several domain names associated with streaming piracy^[4]. Whereas Google and DNS4EU complied with the order, Quad9 did not as they deemed it "ineffective" and that "[s]uch a system would set a precedent that any nation could impose their laws, morals, economic demands, or social constructs upon any other nation by the means of blocking DNS names, and thus blocking communication and content"^[1].

Following Quad9's refusal, beIN Sports France sued them and initially asked for a penalty of 580.000 € per day (which is 10.000 € per blocked domain, as there are 58 domains requested to be blocked). However, the Court of Paris refused to force these penalties, and instead requested a more modest fine of 1.000 € per day until the domain block could come into effect, on November 14th, 2026^[1].

Following the court's decision, Quad9 decided not to comply once again, and warned its users through a post on its blog^[1] that it would shut down its service starting from November 24th, 2026. In its post, Quad9 not only cited this penalty for its departure, but also 20 other pending legal cases against them, which would put them in serious financial trouble.

To defend itself, Quad9 argued that Geo-IP blocking, which is ultimately what beIN Sports France wanted, is ineffective in preventing piracy. It cited its previous lawsuit against Sony Music Entertainment GmbH in 2021 as a precedent, where Sony demanded that Quad9 block access to an unnamed pirate site through its service^[5]. At the beginning of the lawsuit, Quad9 decided to Geo-IP block the aforementioned site as a "hack" that could let them continue operating in the region while waiting to be tried. However, Sony decided to circumvent the block via a VPN, and the court agreed with Sony at the time, saying Quad9's block was ineffective. While Quad9 still ended up winning the lawsuit^[6], Sony effectively proved that Geo-IP blocking wasn't in any way useful in preventing piracy.

Quad9's announcement was met with overwhelmingly negative response from users, from criticising the court's decision^[7] to beIN Sports's decision to sue Quad9 in the first place^[8].