Quad9 to exit France
https://quad9.net/news/blog/au-revoir-france/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.
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"
> 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...)
Delay updates by 1 week.
Answer randomly with the up-to-date or the out-of-date records.
He is, obviously, not French.
His self-claimed annual income was about $15–25 million, and his personal wealth was about $70–100 million.
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 think thus is the real problem. And you can easily replace France with Germany or US here.
- 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?
Quad9 is a Swiss-based not-for-profit organization whose operational budget comes entirely from sponsorships and donations.
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.
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).
I see how that could work against a service claiming to give users the DNS lookups they expect
International companies always have to make a decision: Follow the local rules or leave the market. Unfortunately most companies follow local rules, even if that means obeying the rules of a dictatorship, because money doesn‘t stink. Exceptions are very rare.
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.
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."
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...
I didn’t attempt find the ruling; perhaps the lawsuit was written in an odd way.
I'm confused
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.
Okay, now waiting to see how they will technically block those french users from the 24th nov onward...
Stay Swiss, my friend.
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.
Sums it up. Applicable basically for any court anywhere.
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.
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.
Just absolutely braindead behaviour from so many members of our species.
Shame on you, Macron. What a loser guy. Big words but these are just lies. We really need to no longer put our future into the hands of any politician here. Direct democracy is the only way forward past this point. Courts that work for foreign countries need to be removed. Courts must work, first and foremost, for the local people living in a country.
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.
There's really no reason not to.
> €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.