(context: I'm the CTO of Quad9 and am one of the people dealing with the lawyers)

There is an understandable focus on "how are you going to block French users" when we have also claimed that geoIP blocking is insufficient for selectively denying resolution for certain names - we understand this conflict, but we think it is energy spent in the wrong place.

It is probable that we will use geoIP filters to block French users from our services after November 24. We could apply this same geoIP filter list now to selectively block French users from reaching the sites that we've been told to make unavailable. But this would corrupt our core premise, which is that the DNS is not the right place for this to happen, and if we comply within France to meet the requirement then we accept the worst eventual outcome for users and we still do not have legally perfect coverage. We wish to first remain consistent with our core mission, and secondarily we must remain as close to compliance as we can to the legal constraints put upon us. By accepting the demands for blocking, we would admit that such demands are permissible within our mission - that we will act on behalf of companies (or others) to create ineffective and mis-directed regimes of content constraint.

We would be admitting that we think this solves the problem - it does not. We would be admitting that we will do this for an ever-increasing number of names - we will not. We would be permitting these methods to be applied for more areas of filtering such as moral, religious, social, or political reasons - we must not.

So we accept that there is the possibility that we will have errors in our blockade, but in this case (blocking French users) we maintain consistency with our stated mission of integrity of the DNS. We would rather there be a clear distinction made for users of our services: you get the DNS as you (the user) expects, or if Quad9 is forced to pollute the service with unexpected and arbitrary number of fragmentation demands, then we will not offer the services at all.

The underlying issue is not ONLY that geoIP blocking is ineffective, but that the entire premise of any of these demands is inappropriately applied to DNS recursive resolution providers. We would hope that this discussion continues to be on the most fundamental of the disagreement we have with the outcome in this court case, not on the details of the technical implementation which have yet to be entirely decided and which can be tuned over time.

"The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court."

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

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

This is like saying "we put a lock requested by court and where found guilty because plantif hacked us after"

Seems they're following Cisco similar move 2y ago of exiting the market

> Canal+ has been busy getting web-blocking injunctions in France against sports piracy sites which stream sporting events for which it has the exclusive broadcast rights within the French market. It previously targeted DNS resolvers operated by Google, Cloudflare and Cisco.

> All three unsuccessfully opposed the web-blocking orders. Google and Cloudflare, therefore, have been forced to instigate them. However, Cisco just pulled its OpenDNS service out of the French market entirely.

(Per https://completemusicupdate.com/quad9-vows-to-fight-absurd-w..., https://completemusicupdate.com/opendns-pulls-plug-on-france...)

Punishing the DNS resolver is weird. Would you punish the phone book company for having the number of a criminal listed?

DNS resolvers getting sued should stop resolving domains/properties of the companies suing them too when they are forced to take these kinds of actions/steps off the back of a legal decision like this.

The person behind this legal warfare is the beIN Sports chairman, Nasser Al-Khelaifi. He is also president of Paris Saint-Germain and chairman of Qatar Sports Investment.

He is, obviously, not French.

His self-claimed annual income was about $15–25 million, and his personal wealth was about $70–100 million.

Quad9 is getting picked on because they do not have a large financial backing. Not because it makes any logical sense. France is shooting themselves in the foot.

Thinking about that year when Google pulled out of China

Maybe i missed it in the post, but how are they going to implement it? They mentioned geoIP is insufficient for complying with the block, so if they dont have a way to block only these domains for users in France, how will they block all requests for users in France?

To be clear I dont think they should comply with the block, but i didn't grasp how they're going to block everything if they dont have a way to only block some things.

I mentioned not too long ago that Mullvad was handing its resolver users over to Quad9. Sadly, I didn’t realize how accurate my concerns would be. Quad9 is a good operator, they actually fought Sony in a German court instead of quietly complying. Yet, they were still ordered to block the content. That’s the core problem. A blocking order is only as damaging as the resolver it impacts. Every time an operator shuts down and redirects its users to Quad9, it pools more users into one place. This makes the next blocking order even more valuable and effective for whoever files it. And now we're seeing Quad9 backing out of a market.

Reminds me of Cloudflare going down every time there was a football game in Spain as the ISPs blocked all the "bad" ips, which ironically also served government websites.

Whenever people talk about why you should host in the EU, this is just the most recent example for why should shouldn't.

> The French courts have fundamentally misunderstood the working of the internet and the role of the domain name system

I think thus is the real problem. And you can easily replace France with Germany or US here.

Sports broadcasters truly are the bane of society. May they get DDoS'd during important matches until they're bankrupt.

I am curious if a large number of people stood up their own DoH/DoT servers:

- Would France go after each one, even if they were not operating servers physically in France? It only takes a few minutes to configure Unbound+LetsEncrypt to accept DoH+DoT internet traffic. A few minutes longer to compile support for DoQ.

- Could they realistically expect individual operators of small DoH/DoT/DoQ open servers to block domains at their behest?

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

They're just f*ing with people without getting anyone good stuff.

Suppose they're doing this for copyright, it's not like the pirates would be stopped by a mere DNS block rule set anyway.

If you want to support Quad9 in their dealing with this, you can donate to the cause here: https://quad9.net/donate/

Quad9 is a Swiss-based not-for-profit organization whose operational budget comes entirely from sponsorships and donations.

How have our democracies not abolished copyright law yet? These laws only serve the 1%. I have no idea why we still put up with them.

I’ll bite. I have written a recursive DNS resolver. It’s buggy, mind you, it doesn’t handle improperly configured domains bug-for-bug the way BIND9 does, it doesn’t support IPv6 for resolving records (it can still resolve AAAA records, mind you), but it’s about 80 kilobytes in size, runs nicely on 32-bit systems, and does full DNS resolution starting from the root servers.

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? Am I now required to add these domains, and make them part of a mandatory block list? Will I still be held liable if people can still access these allegedly copyright infringing domains by modifying the source to my program?

Keep in mind that when Quad9 had a similar lawsuit in Germany, they blocked queries from German IPs, but the idiots said Quad9 was still liable because people could use VPNs in Germany to bypass their geoIP blocking.

Quad9 being forced to block these domains will achieve nothing. Will these copyright enforcers now go after Google for 8.8.8.8? Cloudflare for 1.1.1.1? Level3 for 4.2.2.1? Will they go after ISC for BIND? NLnet Labs for Unbound? CZ.NIC for KnotDNS? Me for MaraDNS? Even if they enjoin me from making a recursive resolver which can resolve these domains, that won’t stop anyone and everyone from forking my code (see also: Twitter trying to take down Nitter).

France also regulates encryption in applications. Some percentage of apps are not available in France, because apps don't comply with the rules imposed by bureaucrats or more often developers find procedures cumbersome or unfamiliar

Crazy. A company that actually exits the market they threatened to leave. Meta and Twitter should take note.

We've all seen this sort of thing many times before, but I still don't understand how it works.

I transmit a radio signal in Dover that can be picked up by radios in Calais, the message it carries happens to be illegal in France ("Brittany is still part of the UK", say). Could I be taken to court in France? I'm guessing no.

Why is everybody (in the government) in the EU so illiterate? Do they not understand that their economies are dead and football streaming isn't going to save them.

Europe needs to strengthen its free speech protections. It turns out, even though the US founders had no idea what DNS was, they still created the right framework to protect it.

Noob question: Isn't there like a panel of existing case law or amicus-briefs that would speak to the logical and historical stupidity of arguments by the plaintiffs? I mean this is like blaming airbus for hijackings.

I'm super confused as to what it means to withdraw for French users if geoIP doesn't work.

So remove 9.9.9.9 BGP announcements? Unless France wants to build a great firewall... a Ligne Maginot du DNS, I don't see how this is enforceable. The internet is not Minitel...

> The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.

I knew courts were dumb, but didn't think they were this dumb.

"The neighbour's dog bit me, so they put up a fence. I climbed over it and got bitten again. The fence doesn't count."

The internet is a distributed system, they said.

Genuinely baffled by the incompetence (or ill-intent, corruption?) demonstrated by our courts, did they do it at behest of Qatar ? Another stain on our country's reputation but they don't care.

Why does it matter that it’s a recursive resolver? They mention this a lot but it seems like the decision would just as much apply to a non-recursive resolver.

I didn’t attempt find the ruling; perhaps the lawsuit was written in an odd way.

The great wall of Orleans... Living abroad, I've been embarrassed by my french passport for a number of years. Our reputation sucks, for a reason.

Sorry Quad9. I love you. I am sad France does not understand you the way I always have.

Stay Swiss, my friend.

Seems unlikely to resolve their legal issues, as the French lawyers will use the same tactic as the German ones, using a VPN to access the services from France to justify continuing their lawsuits. Perhaps they should consider relocating out of Europe.

Welp, I've been using quad9 and I'm French, does anyone have an alternative I can switch to?

I wonder what pressure Qatar put on France to force this through?

BeIn is owned by the Qatari state, who just so happen to own Paris St Germain.

Their owners Yousef Al-Obaidly and Nasser Al-Khelaifi (for both the network and the club) are outspoken about piracy and 'the damage it causes football and creative industries'.

They've also been in and out of court a fair bit on corruption charges, and seems they've paid their way out of trouble through fines. Seems just last month a new case opened:

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260920-psg-president...

Nation state meddling, dodgy characters, corruption and greed is more of a threat to football than a DNS resolver, tbh.

Similar misunderstandings have led to Cloudflare blockages during soccer matches in Spain.

Why stopping serving french IPs though? Remove your legal presence in France, sure. But block IP ranges from reaching your servers.. just why?

"There are more important reasons geoIP blocking will not work."

Okay, now waiting to see how they will technically block those french users from the 24th nov onward...

> The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.

This is some fucked up level of incompetency.

That’s why Justice can be abused by whoever got the most money, if it was competent they wouldn’t waste much time on these ridiculous claims.

France becoming China.

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, just to make a point?

They say they don't have data about individual IP addresses, and their report is follows their privacy policy. Yes, right, but think about it as a matter of principle. Normally, a privacy focused service shouldn't collect any data, but for technical or legal reasons, sometimes, they have to. They may need to know how many queries they have and from which zones to properly dimension their infrastructure for instance, so it is normal for them to have these logs, but publishing them in a blog post just to make a point feels like they are ready to use collected data beyond their intended purpose if it serves their interests.

Legally, it is fine, and is is unlikely to hurt anyone, but on principle, that's a red flag.

I wonder why Anonymous seems to be like a thing of the past these days ... There's so many of these fuckers going scot free these days. If anyone know any Anonymous-style movement going after these kind of people, I'm interested to know more.

Sometimes I wonder if the days of a global internet are drawing to a close.

Sony being sleazy again. You start to wonder why they pick on the wrong people.

Better cut all ties to that failed state as quickly as possible.

the lawyers are ruining the internet

They are in a difficult position because the entire point of their DNS resolver is that it blocks malicious sites (malware, phishing, etc.). Very easy for Sony to say, why can't they add piracy to the list? They "refuse to alter or lie to you" in their DNS responses - how would a malware block be lying if those other blocks are not?

How can they even sue you if you aren’t based in France? Just do what 4chan did and tell them to fuck off.

Sadly no-one responsible from this situation will care.

French authorities and network operator will in fact prefer that you don't have alternative than using the dns servers that they are providing.

So it sucks that Quad9 is closing their resolver to french IPs. If they stand by their values, they should continue to accept the requests, just leave all office and business ties with France.

Similar to ofcom things against 4chan.

Lmao. The world is run by morons who are voted for by even more morons. That's why you get stuff like "durrrrrrr we used vpn and could still access it, contempt of court!"

Just absolutely braindead behaviour from so many members of our species.

Donated

Love to see some Lavabit action in response to government overreach. (Not that it's fun to see a provider have to shut down operations in an area, but more that I prefer to see them sticking to their principles rather than showing the government that this behavior is tolerated.)

Blah blah blah. Social social social.

how do they not see the self-inconsistency?

they "cannot" blacklist the domains on geoIP basis, yet the "can" withdraw from France? via what method? Removing the French servers is clearly insufficient, so why can they deny France entirely via geoIP, but not block the domains just via geoIP?

they do claim a value-based reason (good on them for it), but they are very very insistent about the "impossibility" anyway. can't have it both ways.

c'est une catastrophe décidément la fascisation de ce pays

So this is yet another reason why I run unbound locally.

There's really no reason not to.

typical France L as seen in the past few weeks

Cloudflare and Google already blocks these domains. Just saying.

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Another user commented on

> €580,000 to €1,000 per day. But deleted his/her comment.

To put this into perspective, €365K a year is roughly the fully loaded total comp cost of a high-senior to low staff level software engineer or a mid level ML engineer at a frontier lab in Cali.

I'm disappointed in how many pro-piracy comments are in this thread. Free speech does not mean you have the right to steal someone else's labor unencumbered. When actual free speech is blocked, then I'll be among the people rallying -- but blocking a piracy site is blocking cybercrime not legal free speech.