The Swiss Quad9 foundation will switch off its free resolver for users in France on 24 November 2026. The day before, a French court sided with beIN: Quad9 must block recursive resolution of some names for the audience in the country. The fine was cut from €580,000 to a thousand a day. For the foundation, it writes, this is not bookkeeping, it is a principle.
Why “just block it” does not work
Quad9 treats recursive DNS as a neutral service and keeps no user dossiers — there is nothing to map a person to a jurisdiction. Adding the names to the global malware list would spread a French ruling to the whole world. The foundation already tried a geoIP hack in the German Sony case: the plaintiff came in on a VPN, the court treated the block as unmet. Quad9 will not run that trick again.
The foundation does not defend piracy and wants the hit on the place that hosts the files, not on the resolver. Otherwise any private suit turns DNS into a tool of someone else’s commerce. Twenty similar cases are still pending; the foundation cannot pile up daily fines.
How to look at it
For people in France on 9.9.9.9 this is a concrete cut-off date, not a manifesto. For everyone else it is a precedent: a neutral public DNS folds when a court cannot tell a resolver from a host. Change resolver early if you are in France, and do not wait for geoIP to “work around it”. Quad9 does not promise alternatives with the same privacy bar — and that is more honest than a list of “just set this”.