Quad9 Leaves France: Why DNS Blocking Is the New Anti-Piracy Weapon

Quad9 is leaving France. From 24 November 2026, the free, privacy-focused DNS resolver behind the address 9.9.9.9 will stop serving users in France. The Swiss non-profit chose to walk away rather than obey a French court order that requires it to block pirate sports streams – and it is not the first public DNS service to do so.

Why Quad9 leaves France: the beIN Sports case

On 13 May 2026 the Paris Judicial Court ordered Quad9, Google and Whalebone, the operator of DNS4EU, to stop resolving websites that streamed WTA tennis matches without a licence. The case was brought by beIN Sports. The list started with six domains and grew to 58 as new addresses were notified through Arcom, the French media regulator.

Quad9 did not block any of them. beIN asked the court for a penalty of €10,000 per day for every domain still reachable – up to €580,000 a day. In its ruling of 21 October 2026 the court set a much smaller penalty of €1,000 a day in total, running until 14 November, the end of the tennis season: about €24,000 before legal costs. The next day Quad9 announced its exit from France.

Why Quad9 won’t block the sites

Quad9 gives three reasons. It keeps no user records and needs no sign-up, so it cannot reliably tell who is in France. Blocking only French IP addresses is easy to get around with a VPN – something Quad9 learned in an earlier case in Germany, which it eventually won after several years. And blocking the domains for everyone would mean applying a French court order to users all over the world. The foundation says it “categorically” refuses to alter or lie about the DNS answers it sends, and it notes that around 20 similar cases are pending in France. An appeal is also pending.

Not the first public DNS to leave France

In June 2024 OpenDNS, owned by Cisco, suspended its service in France after a blocking order obtained by the broadcaster Canal+ over pirate football streams. Since then French courts have also ordered Google Public DNS, Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1, Quad9 and DNS4EU to block pirate streams of MotoGP and Formula 1 for Canal+. Whalebone even chose to block those domains for all DNS4EU users worldwide, going further than the court asked.

According to TorrentFreak, the same court refused beIN’s penalty requests against Cloudflare and several VPN providers in October 2026, because they had blocked at least some of the domains.

Italy’s Piracy Shield goes the same way

France is not alone. Italy’s Piracy Shield, run by the regulator AGCOM since February 2024, also targets public DNS services and VPNs. In January 2026 AGCOM fined Cloudflare about €14.2 million for refusing to block pirate sites on 1.1.1.1; Cloudflare said it would fight the fine. In July 2026, according to the Italian legal press, Lazio’s administrative court ruled that AGCOM can order DNS and VPN providers based abroad to block sites that reach Italian users, and that “dynamic” orders, which automatically cover new domains and IP addresses, are legitimate.

What DNS blocking means for you

For years, switching your DNS from your internet provider’s to a public resolver such as 9.9.9.9 or 1.1.1.1 was the simplest way around blocked pirate sites. That is changing: the big public resolvers are now targets themselves. A few practical points:

• If you live in France and use Quad9, change the DNS settings on your router, computer, phone and any DNS-over-HTTPS setting in your browser before 24 November.
• Blocking a domain does not remove the site: as the EFF points out, people just switch resolver, and the sites move to new domains. What grows is the number of copies and fake “proxy” sites – our guide on how to spot fake clone sites explains how to avoid them.
• A DNS change hides nothing from your internet provider. If privacy is the reason, a VPN encrypts all your traffic, not only the DNS lookups.
• When a site you use suddenly stops opening, check our site status board before trusting a new address.

What happens next

Quad9’s appeal is still pending, and with about 20 more cases in France, other DNS services may face the same choice. Broadcasters such as beIN and Canal+ are moving from internet providers to every service that sits between users and websites – DNS resolvers, VPNs and content delivery networks. For users, the result is likely to be fewer neutral public resolvers in Europe, not fewer pirate sites.