Quad9 said it will withdraw its free recursive DNS service from France on November 24 after a Paris court ordered it to block resolution for domains accused of pirating beIN sports broadcasts.
The Swiss nonprofit runs a neutral, passive recursive resolver. It maps names to IP addresses on request and, on its filtered addresses 9.9.9.9 and 149.112.112.112, blocks known malware and phishing domains. It does not host content and keeps no user registry.
The court reduced the penalty for noncompliance from €580,000 to €1,000 per day, according to Quad9, but left the blocking order intact until November 14. That leaves about €24,000 in potential fines in this case alone.
Quad9 said it cannot comply and stay true to its mission.
Compliance would require identifying which queries come from France. Quad9 said it holds no database of users or jurisdictions, offers service without signup or identity, and views reliable geofencing of recursive DNS as technically unfeasible and contrary to its privacy mandate. The only alternatives are worse, Quad9 said. Adding the beIN domains to its global threat feed would satisfy the order but would apply a French decision to every user worldwide. Building a France-only filter on GeoIP would be imprecise, easily bypassed, and, Quad9 said, would create a censorship tool that expands with each new demand.
Quad9 pointed to a 2021 to 2023 case in Germany brought by Sony Music Entertainment GmbH. There it tried GeoIP blocking as a stopgap, then was found in contempt after the plaintiff accessed the blocked names via VPN from Germany, Quad9 said. It ultimately prevailed on the merits but paid six figures in costs.
beIN, a Qatari company with offices in France, asked the court to force blocking of domains it says infringe its audiovisual rights, Quad9 said. Quad9 said it has no association with those domains or their operators and that piracy should be addressed at the hosting source, not at third-party resolvers.
The scope extends beyond one case. About 20 lawsuits demanding blocks of hundreds of names are pending against Quad9 and other resolver operators in France, Quad9 said. That pipeline makes paying or absorbing repeated daily penalties unsustainable for a donor-funded foundation.
The exit follows a pattern. Quad9 is the second open resolver to leave France over pirate site blocking orders, reported by TorrentFreak, not confirmed by Quad9.
Quad9 said it will not add the disputed names to any blocklist and will instead stop answering queries from French networks after the deadline, urging users to migrate within 30 days. It said traffic from infrastructure, finance, education and government networks in France will lose its malware filtering when that happens.
What no filing answers is how a court can confine a borderless lookup service to a national boundary without forcing resolvers to identify every user first.
