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...
From your link:
> Internet service providers in Switzerland are obliged to take measures to prevent access to these domains (DNS blocking).
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.
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.
"First they came for the shady weird-ass online gambling sites...."
I think thus is the real problem. And you can easily replace France with Germany or US here.
This is a pretty uniquely EU thing.
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...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/judge-rules-ever...
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...
Aren't that is about the same?
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.
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.
- 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?
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.
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).
Beyond that I think you are asking for behavioral and RFC changes to everyone's workstations, cell phones, tablets, TV's, and DNS resolvers.
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.
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.
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.
Quad9 is a Swiss-based not-for-profit organization whose operational budget comes entirely from sponsorships and donations.
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.
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!"
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...
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.
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 :)
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.
Yeah, fuck those billionaire authors and artists in coffee shops not wanting people to rip off the books and art they create without compensation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
they already have.