Quad9 will leave France on 24 November after a Paris court orders DNS blocking
A Paris court ordered the Swiss DNS foundation to block sports-streaming domains for French users. Quad9 says it cannot do that without tracking users, so it is withdrawing from France instead.
Quad9, the public DNS resolver run by a Swiss non-profit foundation, will stop serving users in France on 24 November 2026. The foundation announced the decision on 22 October, one day after the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris ruled against it in a case brought by beIN, the Qatari sports broadcaster.
The court ordered Quad9 to stop resolving a list of domains that beIN says stream its sports rights without a licence, and set a penalty of EUR 1,000 a day for non-compliance. beIN had asked for EUR 580,000 a day. heise reports that the order also covers most French overseas territories. Quad9 says around twenty similar cases are still pending against it, and it will appeal.
Quad9 says it cannot comply in a way it accepts. It keeps no record of where its users are, so it cannot block for French users alone. In an earlier German case brought by Sony Music, which Quad9 won in 2023, a geo-IP block was circumvented by the plaintiff over a VPN and Quad9 was fined for contempt. Adding the domains to its global blocklist would apply a French order to every user in the world. So it is leaving.
The incumbents chose differently. When a Paris court gave a similar order to Cloudflare, Google and Cisco in 2024 at the request of Canal+, Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 and Google Public DNS complied, and Cisco withdrew its OpenDNS service from France. The Paris Court of Appeal later upheld DNS blocking as proportionate.
The timing is awkward for privacy-minded users. Mullvad closes its own public encrypted DNS service on 2 November and now sponsors Quad9 instead, and Mullvad Browser moves its default resolver to Quad9. Readers in France who want a European resolver after 24 November still have DNS4EU, run by the Czech company Whalebone, but its terms apply court-ordered blocks to every profile, the unfiltered one included. Outside France, Quad9’s service is unchanged.