DNS Provider Quad9 Sees Piracy Blocking Orders as "Existential Threat"

Individual vs systemic responses

• One line of discussion rejects “opting out” of digital media as useless for change, arguing that individual consumer boycotts have negligible leverage.
• Others counter that individual action can still matter, at least for personal quality of life (e.g., libraries) and sometimes historically as the seed of broader change, though not all “activism” is equal.

Capitalism, law, and power

• Several comments frame the situation as a feature of capitalism: systems optimized for profit, not human needs, naturally produce lobbying, regulatory capture, and asymmetric enforcement.
• Others argue the real problem is ideological rigidity (“capitalism vs communism” as secular religions) and the erosion of earlier hybrid models with strong regulation, unions, and welfare.
• There is disagreement over the history and definition of capitalism, but broad agreement that concentrated wealth and sophisticated propaganda undermine meaningful democracy.

How DNS censorship actually works

• Multiple comments clarify that:
  • Root DNS servers mainly point to TLD registries; censorship usually happens at resolver or registry level, not at the roots.
  • ICANN cannot “seize” individual domains; its main tool is registrar de-accreditation.
  • DNSSEC, query minimization, and private root servers limit some censorship vectors but do not stop registry-level takedowns.
• Examples: Germany’s ISP self-censorship and proposed/abandoned DNS blocking in Japan.

Quad9, geo-fencing, and small resolvers

• Some argue Quad9 could just geofence France (as Cisco/OpenDNS did), claiming IP-based blocking is technically simple and cheap.
• Others, including an operator of a public resolver, say at large scale DNS is extremely latency- and volume-sensitive; adding per-country logic and maintaining many national blocklists is operationally and legally costly for small non-profits.
• Blocking entire countries is seen as another kind of existential threat, pushing users toward mega-providers with more resources.

Alternatives and decentralization

• Many suggest running local recursive resolvers (e.g., unbound, Pi-hole), using DNS-over-TLS/HTTPS, Tor, or alternative roots/DNS systems (including ENS/crypto-based naming).
• There’s debate over crypto-based solutions: technically promising but legally and reputationally more exposed than non-monetary volunteer systems like Tor.

User experiences and trust

• Some report Quad9 being slow, intermittently broken, or overblocking benign domains; others move to Cloudflare, Mullvad, or Wikimedia DNS.
• Concern grows that DNS lies (RPZ, malware filters, legal blocks) are normalizing a fragmented, censored view of the internet, making decentralization a defensive necessity rather than a virtue.