Quad9 to stop serving French users on November 24 after beIN DNS blocking ruling

Quad9, the Swiss nonprofit foundation that operates a free, security-focused public DNS resolver, will withdraw its service from France on Tuesday, November 24, 2026. The foundation announced the move in a blog post on October 22, the day after a French court ruled against it in a copyright case brought by beIN, the Qatari-owned sports broadcaster with offices in France.

What the court ordered

According to Quad9, the ruling requires it to block recursive DNS resolution of a list of domain names for users located in France. beIN claims those domains participate in copyright infringement of its sports broadcast audiovisual rights; Quad9 says it has no association with the domains or the people operating them. The court did lower the potential penalty, from €580,000 to €1,000 per day. Quad9 calculates that fines accruing until November 14, when the blocking is meant to conclude, would total about €24,000, excluding legal defense costs. Even so, the foundation frames its response as a question of principle rather than money.

Why Quad9 says it cannot comply

Quad9's resolver is free, requires no account and, by design, keeps no records linking users to jurisdictions. The foundation argues there is no reliable way to determine which queries originate in France, and it rejects the notion that people should have to identify themselves or their location in order to use DNS.

The two technically available approaches are, in Quad9's view, unacceptable. The first is filtering by IP geolocation. Quad9 tried that route in Germany at the start of a 2021 dispute with Sony Music Entertainment: the label reached the blocked domains from Germany over a VPN, the court deemed the geolocation filter noncompliant, and Quad9 was fined for contempt before eventually winning the case, at a cost of several years and a six-figure sum.

The second option is adding the beIN domains to the global threat-blocking list that protects users of its 9.9.9.9 service, while its unfiltered 9.9.9.10 service would remain unaffected. That would satisfy the court, but Quad9 argues it would apply a French judicial decision to every user worldwide, for the commercial benefit of a single foreign private company, setting a precedent in which any nation could project its laws onto the global internet through DNS.

What French users lose

From November 24, users in France will lose access to a resolver that pairs malware and phishing blocking with a privacy posture Quad9 considers compatible with European data protection law. The foundation also warns that it cannot absorb penalties from this case, from the 20 other similar cases it says are still pending, or from future litigation of the same kind.

Why it matters

The core question is where responsibility for online copyright infringement should sit. Quad9's position is that piracy must be addressed where infringing content is actually hosted, and that a recursive resolver, a neutral intermediary that translates domain names into addresses, is the wrong enforcement point. If national courts can order resolvers to alter their answers, either locally, with the geolocation and circumvention problems Quad9 encountered in Germany, or globally, with the extraterritorial reach it refuses to accept, a foundational internet service becomes a lever for national law. The immediate impact falls on French users of a free security service, but the precedent extends to every operator of shared internet infrastructure facing similar orders.