Quad9 to exit France

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

France’s courts have ordered DNS resolver Quad9 to block domains linked to sports piracy, leading the Swiss non-profit to withdraw services from French users rather than selectively censor DNS responses. Commenters see this as an example of overbroad intermediary liability and technical misunderstanding by courts, comparing it to punishing a phone book for listing a criminal’s number and warning that such rulings incentivize centralization, censorship creep and fragmentation of the global internet. The thread also revisits broader disputes over copyright, free speech, and whether infrastructure providers should be conscripted to enforce private commercial rights.

Context of the Case

  • Quad9 (a Swiss non‑profit public recursive DNS resolver) is exiting the French market after French courts ordered it to block piracy‑related domains.
  • Current French case is driven by sports broadcaster beIN; an earlier German case involved Sony Music, where Sony used a VPN to evade geo‑blocks and still got Quad9 fined for “contempt.”
  • Quad9 argues courts fundamentally misunderstand DNS’s role and are mis-targeting resolvers instead of rights holders or hosting providers.

Intermediary Liability & Slippery Slope

  • Many see this as an escalation of “intermediary liability”: states and rightsholders deputizing infrastructure (ISPs, DNS, payment providers, platforms) to police user behavior.
  • Slippery‑slope concerns: if DNS must block, why not browsers, OSes, VPNs, chipsets, or routers? Some fear this leads to a privately mediated police state.
  • Others counter that if Quad9 can and does block malware/phishing, courts will naturally demand it also block piracy or even other illegal content.

GeoIP Blocking, VPNs, and Enforcement

  • Quad9 stresses that geoIP is inherently imperfect and trivial to bypass via VPNs; the German case showed courts treating VPN bypass as non‑compliance.
  • Nevertheless, Quad9’s CTO says they will likely geo‑block French IPs after Nov 24 and remove French infrastructure to minimize jurisdictional exposure, while refusing name‑level filtering.
  • Debate over whether merely serving French users from abroad brings one under French jurisdiction; Lugano Convention is cited as enabling cross‑border enforcement.

Copyright, Piracy, and Morality

  • Strong split:
    • Some view piracy as clear cybercrime; blocking piracy sites is not a free‑speech issue.
    • Others see modern copyright as corporate rent‑seeking that rarely helps small creators, and consider piracy morally acceptable or even “necessary” given abuses.
  • Long sub‑thread on whether copyright should be abolished, radically shortened, or reformed, and how creators might be compensated (patronage, crowdfunding, early access).

Technical DNS & Alternatives

  • Discussion clarifies recursive vs authoritative resolvers; most public resolvers are recursive caches.
  • Quad9 offers filtered (9.9.9.9) and unfiltered (9.9.9.10) services; some argue default filtering weakens its “neutral DNS” stance.
  • Many suggest running local resolvers (e.g., Unbound) or switching to other public DNS, DNS-over-HTTPS, or VPNs; some predict further internet fragmentation along national lines.

Community Reactions & Support

  • Mix of admiration for Quad9’s principled stance and pessimism that courts and lawmakers will keep expanding such blocks.
  • Calls for boycotts of rightsholders and donations to Quad9’s legal fund, alongside cynicism that sports and media money are driving policy.