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Posted by farrokhi 18 hours ago

Quad9 to exit France(quad9.net)
1158 points | 395 commentspage 2
this_user 16 hours ago|
Whenever people talk about why you should host in the EU, this is just the most recent example for why should shouldn't.
fmbb 11 hours ago||
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/judge-rules-ever...
betaby 7 hours ago||
US ISP ignore blocking orders and that was never challenged.
nairboon 16 hours ago|||
Host in Switzerland, that's where Quad9 operates from.
drnick1 15 hours ago|||
Switzerland is not in the EU, thankfully. And it seems to be one of the few places left in Europe where privacy is taken somewhat seriously.
bwoodcock 14 hours ago||
Indeed. If it were just a question of Swiss law, we'd be in excellent shape. The problem is that France and Switzerland are both signatories to the Lugano Convention, while the US is not. As long as the Quad9 Foundation has to have a legal domicile somewhere, there will always be some lever that can be used against it. Switzerland was the best place, but does not offer perfect protection.
sltkr 13 hours ago|||
Switzerland has its own DNS blocklist that all ISPs obey. [1]

Quad9 doesn't obey it but I never understood how they can get away with that legally. I'd be interested in an explanation if someone knows more!

1. https://www.gespa.ch/en/fighting-illegal-gambling/access-blo...

johnhtodd 12 hours ago|||
Quad9 is not a telecommunications service provider as defined by Swiss law, which is where that application becomes enforced. Details of this (and many other things) can be found on the "Compliance and Applicable Law" section of the website. https://quad9.net/privacy/compliance-and-applicable-law/
einsteinx2 13 hours ago||||
Sounds like they get away with it legally because the law applies to ISPs and they’re not an ISP.

From your link:

> Internet service providers in Switzerland are obliged to take measures to prevent access to these domains (DNS blocking).

sltkr 11 hours ago||
I suppose that's it.

It still feels a little strange that that loophole is allowed: everyone who has a Swiss ISP could switch to Quad9 and be strictly better off. But if everyone does that, then the DNS ban is completely ineffectual. Maybe I should let sleeping dogs lie.

einsteinx2 8 hours ago||
I have a feeling the fact that people have to opt in to using Quad9 does a lot to help them in this case vs an ISP where all of their users are using the ISP’s DNS by default. But yeah it does seem like a “letter of the law vs spirit of the law thing”.
leni536 12 hours ago|||
I opened the blocklist expecting some juicy Linux ISO sites and... it's all betting sites. I'm not even mad.
sltkr 11 hours ago|||
I'm a little mad because it's the principle of the thing.

In practice the only site I occasionally want to check that's blocked is Polymarket. I don't trade on there myself, but I find it useful to check the odds of certain events.

walrus01 10 hours ago|||
I don't personally care about betting sites but it's the legal precedent and principle that the government can add anything to such a list and make obligatory.

"First they came for the shady weird-ass online gambling sites...."

privacyishuman 14 hours ago||
Also, hosting location is kind of a deception for real ways to protect data, like E2EE, which work no matter the country.
Helmut10001 15 hours ago||
> The French courts have fundamentally misunderstood the working of the internet and the role of the domain name system

I think thus is the real problem. And you can easily replace France with Germany or US here.

petcat 15 hours ago||
The US doesn't compel ISPs to block websites. The FBI will occasionally seize a domain after a court order, but that's it.

This is a pretty uniquely EU thing.

looperhacks 14 hours ago|||
It hasn't passed yet, but legislators are very hard at work trying to "catch up". [1][2]

And there are other countries outside the US and Europe, it's not just a "EU" thing. (I wanted to write North America first, but even Canada does blocking, in some cases even without court orders [3])

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/congress-reviving-site... [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/congress-has-another-s... [3] https://piracymonitor.org/canada-evolving-piracy-threats-pro...

fmbb 11 hours ago||||
What was this all about?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/judge-rules-ever...

petcat 10 hours ago||
That was reversed instantly because the order was illegal.

Judges try things all the time that end up getting struck down and reversed because they're illegal.

https://torrentfreak.com/court-orders-for-all-us-isps-to-blo...

MentalM 13 hours ago|||
> The FBI will occasionally seize a domain after a court order

Aren't that is about the same?

xyst 13 hours ago||
At least in the US, it’s not a matter of "understanding". It’s a matter of "you are paid to misunderstand".

The law is vast and subject to various levels of interpretation. If there’s anything I have learned is that the court is just a rich persons weapon to "peacefully" resolve problems. In this modern capitalistic, greedy shithole we have dug ourselves into. Money and resources talks.

jeroenhd 16 hours ago||
Sports broadcasters truly are the bane of society. May they get DDoS'd during important matches until they're bankrupt.
intrasight 15 hours ago|
Sports is the only thing left of value in broadcasting. I can totally understand why they're gonna fight tooth and nail to protect it.
asdff 12 hours ago||
They still get paid when people watch pirated streams. All those billboards against the pitch and on every uniform are still getting their viewership.

It would be interesting if one of these advertisers one day actually sues the broadcasters for going after pirated streams, and diminishing the value of their ad placements as a result. I would think it is technically damages. One just has to quantify it a little.

intrasight 9 hours ago||
If they include pirates in viewership data, they might have a valid claim.
jeroenhd 1 hour ago||
They like to claim millions to billions in lost revenue every time they send a takedown request, so clearly they must have a pretty good idea how many pirates are watching.
Bender 16 hours ago||
I am curious if a large number of people stood up their own DoH/DoT servers:

- Would France go after each one, even if they were not operating servers physically in France? It only takes a few minutes to configure Unbound+LetsEncrypt to accept DoH+DoT internet traffic. A few minutes longer to compile support for DoQ.

- Could they realistically expect individual operators of small DoH/DoT/DoQ open servers to block domains at their behest?

drdexebtjl 14 hours ago|
DNS needs a way to say “unavailable for legal reasons” so your system just picks a different resolver or resolves recursively.
Bender 14 hours ago||
DNS needs a way to say “unavailable for legal reasons” so your system just picks a different resolver or resolves recursively.

As far as I know there is no way to reliably:

- let the user see this error. The client would need to surface the DNS EDE error. Stub resolvers and browsers overwhelmingly ignore EDE.

- geo-fence the client. Unbound does not have native Geo support and will not let one set custom per-zone EDE text even if that was a thing AFAIK.

This might be possible by putting dnsdist in front of Unbound with client IP rules + Lua + MaxMind but there again the client won't know what to do with this.

- custom views only trigger off client IP's and only control resolution views, not error messages.

I think it's probably best that if people wish to run their own DNS instances, they do not geo-block anything. France has no jurisdiction in other countries and can't really do anything to "Alice and Bob's Public DNS". It's up to the people in France to find a way to tunnel their traffic out of their country to bypass any border filters should that ever become a thing. I am still waiting for a lawyer to challenge my thinking on this part.

drdexebtjl 13 hours ago||
I don’t want the user to see the error, I just want the browser/the operating system’s resolver to not be a stub resolver, and actually ask the authoritative servers when something like this fails on a non-authoritative response.

Public DNS like Quad9 should be a cache (because recursing is pretty slow) and, at most, a way to find the IPs of the root name servers.

Courts asking non-authoritative resolvers not to resolve a name should have no effect on clients successfully resolving that name, such that they wouldn’t even have a reason to go after Quad9 or Alice and Bob, and would have to go after the TLD registry (likely in a different jurisdiction).

Bender 12 hours ago||
The only thing I know of that operates somewhat like you are asking is Unbound itself, when it is not the server doing the root/tld lookups. One can configure Unbound with a series of Upstream DoT servers and it can retry each of them and cache which ones answered, answered fastest, so if the upstream just refused to answer that would cause it to move to another upstream resolver and eventually retry the one that refused but once it gets another refusal it would avoid that one again for some time. Clunky but it would sortof work.

Beyond that I think you are asking for behavioral and RFC changes to everyone's workstations, cell phones, tablets, TV's, and DNS resolvers.

drdexebtjl 12 hours ago||
Yes, I use Unbound :)

It’s configured exactly like I mentioned: it tries a couple of resolvers, and if they all fail, tries authoritative servers starting from the root. That last part, missing from your suggested configuration, is the key: it’s what ensures courts have to actually go after the parties responsible for the domain, and not just random DNS resolvers.

> Beyond that I think you are asking for behavioral and RFC changes to everyone's workstations, cell phones, tablets, TV's, and DNS resolvers.

We did it once for DoH/DoT, we could do it again.

_imnothere 16 hours ago||
Time to boycott Sony, they deserve no money from anyone, and I meant anyone.

They're just f*ing with people without getting anyone good stuff.

Suppose they're doing this for copyright, it's not like the pirates would be stopped by a mere DNS block rule set anyway.

antiframe 16 hours ago||
> Time to boycott Sony, they deserve no money from anyone, and I meant anyone.

Because when they installed rootkits on user's machines wasn't that time?

Because when they removed content users purchased from their machines wasn't that time?

Because when they spy on what users watch on their TVs in the privacy of their home wasn't that time?

Sony is like a tree. The best time to boycott Sony was decades ago. The second best time is today.

WesolyKubeczek 12 hours ago||
Sony copyright-striking pianists performing public domain music and uploading their own performances on YouTube wasn't that time?
Narishma 14 hours ago|||
Why are so many comments talking about Sony? The case was brought by beIN Sports.
einsteinx2 13 hours ago||
Because Sony was mentioned once in the article in reference to a different earlier case and people seem to have stopped reading there to come here and immediately complain about Sony.
raquuk 16 hours ago|||
Yes, but in this case the plaintiff is beIN SPORTS France.
ErneX 12 hours ago||
Read the article, it’s not Sony it’s Bein the ones who have the soccer broadcast rights.
monneyboi 12 hours ago||
If you want to support Quad9 in their dealing with this, you can donate to the cause here: https://quad9.net/donate/

Quad9 is a Swiss-based not-for-profit organization whose operational budget comes entirely from sponsorships and donations.

nish__ 17 hours ago||
How have our democracies not abolished copyright law yet? These laws only serve the 1%. I have no idea why we still put up with them.
numpad0 16 hours ago||
FOSS depends on copyright laws. Oldest versions of Linux and UNIX are more than 20 years old, so early versions of both would be hypothetically now in public domain in the absence of Disney-lobbied maximalist versions of copyright laws, or in the total absence of one.
skrause 15 hours ago|||
And this would be a problem how? If copyright expired after 20 years and an evil commercial company privately forked the public domain Linux kernel 2.6.18, what would we lose?
coryrc 13 hours ago||
> what would we lose?

Who is "we"? Going back to the origin of Free Software to proprietary printer drivers causing hardware to be unfixable by its users and otherwise become ewaste. The loss is users are nearly beholden to the manufacturer to customize or maintain their own devices. Android phones, most ereaders, can have long lives when obsolete, but this is only because Linux is Free Software; with proprietary kernels they are entirely ewaste instead of a small fraction having continuing life. OTOH most do become ewaste. OAH this Free Software allows competitors to start from almost the same place and prevent total monopolies, hence why Apple makes most of the profit and I can buy a $150 phone instead of what appears to be $799 minimum from Apple.

But, I think 20 year-old software is probably mostly safe from the above effects and I'm not sure GP was arguing otherwise, just against total absence of copyright.

nish__ 16 hours ago||||
No it doesn't. Most projects are MIT or some other permissive liscense.
tredre3 15 hours ago|||
> Most projects are MIT or some other permissive liscense.

Exactly, most projects have a license of some kind, they aren't "free-for-all-do-whatever."

MIT requires attribution. Forcing enforcement of this cannot be done without copyright law. You can argue that attribution is stupid and nobody deserves credit for their work (which might be increasingly true in a post-LLM world), but you can't speak on behalf of all projects that chose those license and say "it's what they want!"

mahboi 13 hours ago|||
I think projects should be able to license their work how ever they want within reason, which GPL and MIT clearly are. At the same time, I don't see what material difference this makes. The spirit of GPL doesn't seem maintained, cause at this point it's very clearly being used for profit in proprietary systems that stay compliant by not technically distributing any GPL'd code. LLMs appear to legally wash away GPL for now, still grey area though. And GPL is straight up violated all the time, especially in countries that don't care.
immibis2 13 hours ago|||
MIT is free-for-all-to-do-whatever. You can do literally anything, except remove a short text notice that has zero legal or practical value. You can even hide the text notice very deeply, so that it's effectively been removed. You can fork and stop releasing source code, you can use it for AI training, you can add DRM to the product and make it illegal to remove.
numpad0 15 hours ago|||
Aside what was already said: a lot of people do genuinely think GPL is a stupid idea that needs to go and Linux could have been licensed under MIT or even CC0; however, I think one should be cognizant of the fact that virtually no mass produced product other than Macs and PS4/PS5 use BSD and the rest uses Linux, often begrudgingly, but benefiting tremendously from both free-beer and forced-libre nature of it.
pessimizer 15 hours ago|||
FOSS only "depends" on copyright laws in the sense that it is a hack to get around the existence of them (and now their children, anti-circumvention laws.)
immibis2 13 hours ago|||
There was a recent attempt to substantially reform copyright in the EU - it was called "Stop Killing Games". It gathered over one million signatures, forcing the EU parliament to consider it. Their response was "this would require us to change copyright law, and we can't do that, sorry."

The USA strong-arms copyright law into every single trade deal. I think it was Chile who tried to strike DMCA 1201 out of some trade deal with the US about food staples, but were swiftly informed by the US that if they didn't make DMCA 1201 into Chilean domestic law, the US would completely cut off their trade. This stuff is serious business for the US and no other country is in the geopolitical position right now to question it.

Fortunately since the US is mid-collapse that last point may change soon.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/28/disenshittification-natio...

dist-epoch 16 hours ago|||
How do you feel about OpenAI training on all of the books in the world.
christophilus 16 hours ago|||
Fine, as long as they aren't the only ones who get to do it. Having the world's knowledge at everyone's fingertips is a goal I think we should aim for.
drnick1 14 hours ago|||
This. Some people here are now acting as if AI is a bad thing. People need to realize that human knowledge is so vast now that such tools (which effectively perform data compression and interpolation) are absolutely necessary. I don't feel bad for copyright holders at all because copyright shouldn't probably exist at all.
bigstrat2003 14 hours ago||
> Some people here are now acting as if AI is a bad thing.

It is. But that is also not particularly relevant to the point. As long as the AI companies operate under the same rules as everyone else, I don't really care. If they can use copyrighted works for training, we should all be able to use those works. Conversely if we can't use something due to copyright, neither should the AI companies be able to.

SoftTalker 14 hours ago|||
Is it still a worthy goal if it the knowledge includes the rantings of every lunatic on X or Reddit? If it hallucinates facts and even citations in its non-deterministic reconstruction of the knowledge it ingested?
sham1 16 hours ago||||
The irony with these AI corpos is that they're okay with scraping all of human creative endeavours yet they get annoyed at others doing distillation on their models.

Compensating authors would be a moral thing to do, but morals aren't really a thing for corpos, so whatever. However the fact that they then turn around and get annoyed at other actors for scraping their stuff is very hilarious and shows how much they care about the social contract :)

nish__ 16 hours ago||||
It makes me feel like the rules are "for thee, not for me." Like it proves that the rich can just do whatever they want.
betterunix2 14 hours ago|||
Is there some reason I should have a problem with it?
slopinthebag 11 hours ago|||
because people have been successfully propagandised into believing it to be necessary or good. of course they argue for it without any evidence.
bigstrat2003 14 hours ago|||
> How have our democracies not abolished copyright law yet? These laws only serve the 1%.

I don't think that claim is true, personally. But if we grant it for the sake of argument, it should be completely unsurprising that copyright hasn't been abolished. Governments primarily serve the powerful and wealthy, not the common man.

cyanmagenta 16 hours ago||
> How have our democracies not abolished copyright law yet? These laws only serve the 1%

Yeah, fuck those billionaire authors and artists in coffee shops not wanting people to rip off the books and art they create without compensation.

roblabla 16 hours ago|||
I find it extra funny that you think copyright protect small time authors and artists, when we have _very clear_ examples of it not protecting them for shit, even before the entire IA saga. Remember the Disney/Star Wars saga where they refused to pay the Star Wars author for the books they were selling?

https://archive.bookstr.com/article/royalty-wars-over-star-w...

Copyright doesn't protect small-time authors - because small-time authors don't have the means to harness the legal system to their advantage the way that big corpos that take advantage of them do.

cyanmagenta 16 hours ago|||
I don’t necessarily disagree, but by that same logic we shouldn’t have any civil laws because regular people can’t afford to hire lawyers to sue people.

But still, if someone posts a copy of your book or painting online, you can pretty cheaply file a DMCA request that it be taken down, and most large players will comply. If you throw out copyright law altogether, you get rid of that too.

warkdarrior 15 hours ago||
> But still, if someone posts a copy of your book or painting online, you can pretty cheaply file a DMCA request that it be taken down, and most large players will comply. If you throw out copyright law altogether, you get rid of that too.

Good, get rid of copyright law! It has only lead to pure rent seeking.

numpad0 15 hours ago|||
Authors and artists have no basis for payment in the absence of copyright laws. Like, anything they make would be literally free to steal. Literally... 1700s? Late 1600s?

What would be controversial is the current form of copyright that had been extended and expanded multiple times even during lifetime of many of us alive, often said semi-jokingly said to have been forced by Disney to keep Mickey Mouse covered under it until it had finally expired 70 years after the first publication and long after the death of its creator.

betterunix2 14 hours ago||
Copyright was established for the benefit of publishers, not authors. In the 1600s publishers were licensed, as part of a censorship system; the point was to only give licenses to publishers who followed the censorship rules. It was quite profitable for the publishers because they faced far less competition than they otherwise would.

The censorship system was abolished but the publishers wanted to keep the licensing system, so they came up with a new idea: licensed monopolies to publish specific books.

arto 14 hours ago||
Exactly right. Karl Fogel's excellent write-up recaps the history: https://questioncopyright.org/promise/index.html
nish__ 16 hours ago||||
Copyright laws don't benefit independent artists. They only work for you if you can afford a litigation team.
AndroTux 16 hours ago||||
The 1% just copied all available data without consequence. Yet, Quad9 gets sued and loses.
surgical_fire 16 hours ago||||
AI companies already ripped those things off.

Copyright is a sham. It does not protect the small guy, only the rich corporations.

I am back to piracy, now on a moral imperative. I can pay for stuff, but I think the morally superior thing to do is to pirate away.

sham1 16 hours ago|||
While your point is valid enough -- although it could have been made without this kind of snarky and sarcastic snide -- it seems clear that global copyright legislation is a lot more beneficial to the wealthy capital owners rather than the artists that you were alluding towards. Now, this is no insurmountable obstacle at least in theory. The laws could be modified in a way that lets small artists etc focus on following their passions without starving, without allowing capital to do what is essentially the intellectual equivalent of enclosure of the Commons.

Of course, one thing needed for this is the political will as well as getting rid of the idea of defending exploitation by the billionaire class by conflating their needs with the needs of starving artists because one can technically argue that copyright helps both, despite everyone knowing that one party is benefiting a lot more from it than the other.

rickydroll 15 hours ago||
All copyright does is give you standing to sue if somebody reproduces your work, in whole or in part. To sue "successfully," you need more financial resources than the copier.

The small artist copyright is a red herring. I think the number of small artists who make money from their work is frightfully small. For example, my partner makes some rather nice jewelry that is different from anything out there. We're doing the craft fair circuit to see if she can sell any and if it's worth continuing to make them.

She sells a relatively small number of pieces at each fair. Occasionally it's even enough to cover expenses.

Would copyright help her? No, because we wouldn't have the money to sue. Small copyright violations might be worth a cease and desist. Large copyright violations would have more money than us for the lawsuit. We would need that Goldilocks-sized violation. They are small enough to be responsive to the threat of a lawsuit but big enough that they have enough money that would be worthwhile suing them, i.e. enough to pay our lawyer.

bigstrat2003 14 hours ago||
> All copyright does is give you standing to sue if somebody reproduces your work, in whole or in part. To sue "successfully," you need more financial resources than the copier.

That is the fault of the way the legal system works, not anything to do with copyright law. It is true that we need a system in which you can't just get away with breaking the law if you have deeper pockets than your victim, but that will be true whether or not we have laws protecting copyright.

rickydroll 12 hours ago||
The question I have is what is copyright for? As far as I can tell, it is used for censorship, and rent extraction.
strenholme 12 hours ago||
I’ll bite. I have written a recursive DNS resolver. It’s buggy, mind you, it doesn’t handle improperly configured domains bug-for-bug the way BIND9 does, it doesn’t support IPv6 for resolving records (it can still resolve AAAA records, mind you), but it’s about 80 kilobytes in size, runs nicely on 32-bit systems, and does full DNS resolution starting from the root servers.

Does the fact I have written this resolver make me liable should it not block the domains they listed which may contain copyright infringing content? Am I now required to add these domains, and make them part of a mandatory block list? Will I still be held liable if people can still access these allegedly copyright infringing domains by modifying the source to my program?

Keep in mind that when Quad9 had a similar lawsuit in Germany, they blocked queries from German IPs, but the idiots said Quad9 was still liable because people could use VPNs in Germany to bypass their geoIP blocking.

Quad9 being forced to block these domains will achieve nothing. Will these copyright enforcers now go after Google for 8.8.8.8? Cloudflare for 1.1.1.1? Level3 for 4.2.2.1? Will they go after ISC for BIND? NLnet Labs for Unbound? CZ.NIC for KnotDNS? Me for MaraDNS? Even if they enjoin me from making a recursive resolver which can resolve these domains, that won’t stop anyone and everyone from forking my code (see also: Twitter trying to take down Nitter).

koyote 11 hours ago||
> Does the fact I have written this resolver make me liable should it not block the domains they listed which may contain copyright infringing content?

I use unbound and have a similar question. Shouldn't we just encourage everyone to run their own resolvers (it's turnkey for the most part!)? Will Sony/beIn start going after the root servers and enforce a global block?

bragr 12 hours ago||
>Will these copyright enforcers now go after Google for 8.8.8.8? Cloudflare for 1.1.1.1?

they already have.

aborsy 13 hours ago||
France also regulates encryption in applications. Some percentage of apps are not available in France, because apps don't comply with the rules imposed by bureaucrats or more often developers find procedures cumbersome or unfamiliar
EmbarrassedHelp 12 hours ago||
Macron's party has also been trying to require encryption backdoors for years, and are major supporters of Chat Control.
paulgdp 13 hours ago||
Can you tell more? Which apps?
aborsy 13 hours ago|||
Syncthing apps for example. Search for example comments of Synctrain app developer in syncthing forum.
pzmarzly 11 hours ago|||
https://github.com/pixelspark/sushitrain/discussions/128

https://cryptomator.org/blog/2016/06/16/indepth-french-app-s...

trentor 17 hours ago|
Crazy. A company that actually exits the market they threatened to leave. Meta and Twitter should take note.
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