Quad9 to exit France
quad9.net
quad9.net
There is an understandable focus on "how are you going to block French users" when we have also claimed that geoIP blocking is insufficient for selectively denying resolution for certain names - we understand this conflict, but we think it is energy spent in the wrong place.
It is probable that we will use geoIP filters to block French users from our services after November 24. We could apply this same geoIP filter list now to selectively block French users from reaching the sites that we've been told to make unavailable. But this would corrupt our core premise, which is that the DNS is not the right place for this to happen, and if we comply within France to meet the requirement then we accept the worst eventual outcome for users and we still do not have legally perfect coverage. We wish to first remain consistent with our core mission, and secondarily we must remain as close to compliance as we can to the legal constraints put upon us. By accepting the demands for blocking, we would admit that such demands are permissible within our mission - that we will act on behalf of companies (or others) to create ineffective and mis-directed regimes of content constraint.
We would be admitting that we think this solves the problem - it does not. We would be admitting that we will do this for an ever-increasing number of names - we will not. We would be permitting these methods to be applied for more areas of filtering such as moral, religious, social, or political reasons - we must not.
So we accept that there is the possibility that we will have errors in our blockade, but in this case (blocking French users) we maintain consistency with our stated mission of integrity of the DNS. We would rather there be a clear distinction made for users of our services: you get the DNS as you (the user) expects, or if Quad9 is forced to pollute the service with unexpected and arbitrary number of fragmentation demands, then we will not offer the services at all.
The underlying issue is not ONLY that geoIP blocking is ineffective, but that the entire premise of any of these demands is inappropriately applied to DNS recursive resolution providers. We would hope that this discussion continues to be on the most fundamental of the disagreement we have with the outcome in this court case, not on the details of the technical implementation which have yet to be entirely decided and which can be tuned over time.
Oh right, the blocked domain is probably not a french TLD...
I don’t get why you would still need to block french users if you also need to exit the jurisdiction.
The Principality of Sealand*
* until the UK or French navy shows up
But even being based in Switzerland I believe there’s some inter-countries agreements, so it would not be practical.
GP's point is that whenever you sell or offer something to users in U, you have to abide by U's laws in doing so - no matter whether you did that all while sitting at your desk in country C.
Whether or not enforcement or liability is realistic is up to the relationship between U and C I guess - my guess is France and Switzerland are on pretty good terms.
This is not exactly your focus, but this means that it can be possible for there to be a set of laws in U, such that an action is required and illegal if not present, but that this same action is illegal in C...
I.e., the predication is both meaningless and pointless, unless the supposition is that the laws of U don't hold - if C extradites a citizen of U over said action, is then U's law not supreme?
We do not block IP traffic from known Turkish ISP ranges. The customer (the political group) receives all sorts of dire legal warnings and threats that what they publish is contrary to Turkish law.
None of our other hosting platforms are configured to block any traffic to/from Turkish IP ranges. We have no business presence or financial involvement with anything domestically in Turkey. Am I subject to Turkish jurisdiction? I don't think so.
But by what you wrote, I am providing services in Turkey.
Could Turkish intelligence link me to the company if they spent significant resources researching the hosting company that provides services to their political enemies? Probably. Do I have any personal plans to take a vacation in Turkey any time soon, or a pressing need to visit Turkey? No.
I am pretty sure we also have someone, somewhere hosting something that insults the King of Thailand, so I suppose that's a risk too.
If I operate a bookstore physically in switzerland and a few of the books I sell are illegal in france I'm not required to check passports or whatever, am I? I can just sell books to whoever (subject to swiss law) and if a french national illegally imports one to france that's a problem for customs or the local police or whoever (analogously the french ISPs) to deal with. Not me, the swiss bookstore operator.
Now consider if I were handing out pamphlets for free rather than selling anything. At that point I'm arguably not even doing business because no money has changed hands.
I realize that the current legal reality might be that quad9 needs to block french users in practice but the entire thing is a farce if you stop and think about it.
In the Quad9 people’s case, defying French law and still doing operating the services under French jurisdiction might work out just fine for as long as (1) holds true, but it doesn’t take a consorted effort of research to change that. It could just be that some leaked piece of information eventually surfaces. It could be a tweet posted by someone else. And I don’t know how many people work for that organization, or might do so in the future, but it seems like a bad move to make a decision on their behalf to paint a target on all their backs.
Also, France being part of the EU makes being an enemy of the state there seem even more unwise for anyone who might want to have associations in any other EU country.
I personally would do exactly what they are doing: if French people want a government that respects free speech, they had better elect one themselves. I wouldn’t become a martyr to that cause - it wouldn’t help anyway.
It is about as enforceable as "don't read letters written by redheaded people": it'll never be airtight, and it'll always have a huge amount of false positives.
The only possible "solution" is to ban all open devices from the internet, mandate a DRM-style "trust zone", have the device do mTLS, and embed a realtime DNA sequencer in every device.
Realistically, Switzerland and France have a relationship; treaties, etc. Quad9 has to comply with Swiss law, and they probably hope that making reasonable good-faith moves to block French users will cause Swiss courts (if it comes down to that) to see them as the more sympathetic party.
Regardless of what analogy you use, the point is that the company isn't in France, it's in Switzerland. It doesn't make sense for it to have to do anything to comply with French law, even if it's interacting with someone who happens to be in France.
WRT your second paragraph, I think I addressed it already in my second paragraph.
bruh
Counterpoint: piracy is moral.
I’ll always support those who are willing to take such risks where I am not.
Pretty inconvenient with the Internet being a thing.
The threat feeds we offer are in alignment with what the user expects and intends. Mandatory restriction of DNS resolution by a third party (not the user, not Quad9) is expressly what users do NOT want, regardless of the outcome. Once such restrictions are enacted and treated as normal, the channel for making demands will fill with a flood of "objectionable" names from every corner for every reason. Quad9 has already received demands from the French regulator to block sites which deliver adult content found to be objectionable to minors. We see an extremely slippery slope which has already moved out of piracy as the scoped intent which is this case in particular.
More to the point: prohibiting content via the DNS is a useless exercise when it is done out of alignment with the end users' goals - they will simply use some other recursive resolver (or their own) probably without the benefits of being oriented towards security and privacy. We have no monopoly on DNS resolution - there are thousands of others open to public use, and anyone can set up their own, for free, with no mandatory requirements by governments or regulators. This case (and any others like it) only drives out law-abiding organizations who are trying to promote better cyber hygiene and who want to keep the DNS as a single, un-splintered high-integrity pointer system.
TIL that filtering is on by default on the standard resolver (9.9.9.9). That’s certainly a surprise to me; I would have expected the standard resolver to provide “honest” DNS responses and a secondary to provide filtering, rather than the reverse (which is what I think Cloudflare does).
While I think that the ruling is both morally and legally questionable, I do agree with GP that this weakens your original argument quite a bit.
Their offering is explained in the first paragraph of the home page, in fact the h1 and page title cover it.
There was a rumour years ago that Quad9 was connected to UK intelligence, or something like that. I haven't heard anyone discuss there for a long time, but wondering if you (or anyone reading this) can comment on the source of the rumours and whether there is any veracity to them.
You can literally [sigh] be your own journalist in this regard. All you need is a DNS query tool. I recommend dig but you might only have nslookup available out of the box.
Now, this UK intelligence thing. Even if James Bond Q's mates were actually running a DNS system you can still query it and compare it to someone else's view of the internet, say 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 or whatever.
You can also go to the source, ie root: . and work your own way down to decide on what is what.
Let's have a go at an analogy: DNS is (not really) a bit like a topographical map. You could buy your maps from DodgyRussianMaps'R'us and be surprised that Ukraine has somehow been subsumed by a bunch of murderous wankers. On the other hand you might buy your maps from HonestJonOffOfFaceb00c and note that it isn't. You can, of course, ask for a few other opinions and make up your own mind.
My real point is that DNS is actually quite hard to tamper with, without breaking so many things that everyone can know it is being messed with. When an org resorts to fiddling with DNS they've already lost whatever argument is to be had.
Sure, on a reply based approach you can audit a DNS service.
But that doesn't tell you about other things like "is my DNS provider also providing intelligence agencies with my entire DNS query history?". The issue isn't "oh no the MI6 can redirect my PornHub link to anothe site", but "oh no the MI6 knows every single webpage I visited". Which is a valid worry given the current British political climate.
That's not for the average punter but where there is a will there is a way.
I don't think that you live within the "current British political climate" nor do I think you know too much about it. Please feel free to educate us about your ideology and then we can usefully engage.
And also you can just serve DNS normally and get the intelligence.
Quad9 openly operate in threat intelligence: https://quad9.net/news/blog/protecting-millions-in-asia-a-ca...
City of London and Manhattan District Attorney’s Office suggests finance is a factor, so I'll hazard a guess that Quad9's telemetry is useful for protecting the interest of finance: e.g. learning of new/popular domains that might be tricking users/businesses into fraudulent activity.
Quad9 meanwhile have the remit to provide the best public resolver, including fighting cases as they do.
[0] Denmark has an opt-out from this area of EU law, which is why it is the only EU member state which needs to be directly party to the treaty; it applies to the others indirectly through the EU as a whole being a party to it
However, I don’t know whether the other aspects of Liechtenstein’s legal and political system would make that viable or not.
I wonder how much longer the internet will manage to hold out. Governments will continue trying to impose their laws on it, causing the international network to degenerate to numerous national networks with heavy filtering at the borders. It's really sad to watch...
The opinions differ about which other border side guys are the bad ones and what should the goverment do about it.
Yes, but that's not circumventing anything. That's an essentially approved method for foreigners specifically because they don't care about keeping foreigners within the GFW.
Once that foreign esim is behind a GFW equivalent of whichever country it is from, what then?
> I think places like China put in a lot of effort
Yes, which is why China was tricky.
1. A government has authority for a geographical "box".
2. The government succeeds if it can plug all the "holes".
3. Rogue anti-government behavior punches new holes all the time, which is an endless battle.
In the case of the internetwork, we're two underwater cable cuts away from severing the planet asunder and effectively patching most of the "holes", but that would also destroy most of the economy, so no government really wants to do it.
I guess my political statement/point is that as long as there's too much to track, we're all safe, so making more things across more domains makes everyone safer.
If they want to fuck with us, it's time to start fucking back.
It sounds like selectivd site blocking is against your mission, so will you then just not offer Quad9 to any person in France instead (total blackout across all sites)?
Sorry if I’m missing the obvious or your stated solution.
Qatar spends a lot of money to bribe european politicians - that is known for a long time now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
And now we know why Qatar bribes everyone in the EU. They buy legislation. Or at the least rulings.
It seems you are under heavy legal pressure, mostly from companies which are abusing usual ignorance of courts.
Despite going against you stand for, why not consider implementing a service fee of 100,000 euros per domain name that is requested to be blocked?
I wish I was /s on this but this be a way for you to say that you comply, with no sane company would go about requesting tens or hundreds of domains to be blocked, endlessly, for the rest of eternity (as the courts currently are asking your company to do, forever, at your own cost).
Technically, there is GeoIP filtering going into place after the 24th so why not put that to good use for a while until you get some orders for this new service (or a drop in interest from the suitors) ?:)
Good luck.
Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.
I wish I could even suggest what someone could do against these trolls.
This is like saying "we put a lock requested by court and where found guilty because plantif hacked us after"
Isnt this what gets all tech companies into trouble all the time. Something objectionable happens (ChatGPT helping someone bulid a bomb for instance) and we go like "Do better".
I have sympathy for my fellow man. There isn't enough liability in the world for these corporations.
The whole intellectual property space is pure rent seeking. Everybody wants name recognition and/or money whenever some text, code, image, or video they produced is used or remixed. It is pure rent seeking, from FSF to Sony to Metallica.
If that's true, so is the private property space in general.
But what you say isn't true. The "intellectual property space" is not pure rent seeking. If someone labors to write a novel, they're no less justified to get economic benefit from it than someone who labored to build an apartment building.
Intellectual property critics have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are problems with IP, but those specific should be fixed through reform.
are you saying that electricians should get a monthly rent fee from any circuit theyve touched?
i think we can do just fine treating IP like other work - you pay for the creation of it, not the consumption
Replicating work of an electrician or builder is very similar effort to their original work.
Making a copy of a novel or software program or art today is practically free.
In case of work for hire, things pretty much work the same way already — company owns the copyright, except in some jurisdictions where actual humans keep "moral rights" and reserve the right to renegotiate the fee if the work produces disproportionate earnings (one cannot even transfer these rights away).
But if you did the work out of pocket, how should it work? Any recipient could trivially and cheaply produce a copy and distribute it. If you do not get any exclusivity at all, others would profit a lot more and you'd get nothing at all.
So in general, there are multiple things:
* exclusivity lasts too long (I understand some motivation like supporting your children off it, especially if work only became profitable late in your life or in death, but you could have different mechanisms too — akin to moral rights, exclusivity could run from the moment it turns a significant profit like an average annual salary, and for a fixed, much shorter period after)
* types of works which are utilitarian (like software tools) should have entirely different treatment
* it should ensure both transferability and perpetuity of use (no licensing bullshit and your games/music are gone because our service does not offer them anymore)
...
> are you saying that electricians should get a monthly rent fee from any circuit theyve touched?
My example was a simplification, so don't take it to literally.
It's also worth noting that other property rights have no time limit. Except in China, whoever owns that apartment building can own it forever.
This is wrong.
In the UK, property rights are mostly leasehold, just as they are in Singapore for HDB flats.
they do if they build their own house and rent it out
They absolutely are, because an apartment building is a _rival_ good, as are all physical goods, meaning that you and somebody else cannot both own and use it at the same time. Intellectual property is a non-rival good, meaning if somebody else copies your song or story, you still have that song/story! It's a very different moral claim; the apartment is "I built it, so nobody should be able to take it away from me without paying", while the IP is "I built it, so nobody else should be able to copy it without paying".
I don't think that distinction is as important as you make it out to be. Private property law allows individuals to own far, far more physical goods than they can personally use.
If were going to talk about abolishing intellectual property, how about lets talk about abolishing private property too? Maybe replace it with some kind of active-use right.
Anyway, lets destroy it first and work the details out later. /s
At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore. We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
- Pay in advance, before the product exists.
- Pay for early access that other people don't have. (Yes, in the absence of copyright, people could take the early-access version and share it with others. People already do this today, and that doesn't stop folks from continuing to be patrons anyway.)
- Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money than they otherwise might have. Small price to pay for having a rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things and modifying things.
If most of the people around you believe that making money is the logical way to survive then making money will become the goal of many to most human interactions. People will choose big publishers because big publishers guarantee them some amount of money (and services around publishing) in exchange for the ownership and monetisation rights (and then the right to sue somebody into oblivion when they break copyright law).
So the rich and vibrant ecosystem can be reality, just not within current society.
For books and music maybe the difference is not quite that big, but for games and movies these 0.0..01% cost so much more to make that they would definitely not get made if they made significantly less money.
People should be paid for the labor of creating, not for artificially scarce copies of the finished product.
Patronage has been known as an alternative to copyright since around 200 years ago:
https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
The cited drawbacks are valid: creators are beholden to the elites who fund their work, and their influence in their creative process is felt to this day.
With modern technology, however, funding is diffused through large groups of people which minimizes this impact through diversification.
The ideal model is one where lots of people pitch in to fund a creator for the full cost of creating something, then the resulting work is released directly to the public domain.
That's some bizarre logic: copyright predates the existence of scientific papers [edit: published as a for-profit activity dependent on copyright]. Why would the 20/21st century experience of publishing a scientific paper have any bearing on what it's always been?
Scientific publishing is messed up because, unlike most other creative work, it has a different funding model (basically state patronage), which basically makes the publishers very profitable parasites. That should be addressed directly instead of abolishing copyright for all works.
> Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job." ... or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
That's more bizarre logic: "Authors don't get paid enough, so lets take away their rights so they get paid less."
> At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore.
Copyright was setup before the industrial revolution, so your statement doesn't make sense. Also, at least in some countries, its foundation is the moral rights of the author, not some argument about production.
> We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It seems like you have gripes coming from a particular problem area (scientific publishing?) and are too narrowly focused on that. "I have this gripe, lets decommission this important legacy system, and then rewrite it completely from scratch!" is usually not a good plan.
Firstly, this isn’t true, but more importantly it doesn’t matter because the parent’s claim doesn’t depend on scientific papers predating copyright.
The first scientific paper was Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, published in London on March 6, 1665 (or you can go back as far as Aristotle if you prefer). The first copyright law is England’s Statute of Anne (1710).
[citation needed] /s
"Philosophical Transactions is the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal. It was launched in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677), the Society’s first Secretary, who acted as publisher and editor. "
https://royalsociety.org/journals/publishing-activities/publ...
"Modern copyright law was invented on April 10, 1710, with the enactment of the Statute of Anne in Great Britain"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
see also the U.S. Copyright Act of 1790: Signed into law by President George Washington on May 31, 1790 and the Berne Convention (1886)
My bad. I edited out a "probably" I shouldn't have, and was writing based on the intuition that there were people working as authors writing plays and the like before you had people working as scientists.
Indeed, the entire history of humanity is that of creation and sharing and teaching - of ideas, stories, songs, poems. Copyright is a mere three centuries old. And somehow people have come to believe that without it, creation will cease. Even while simultaneously correctly understanding that virtually every person who writes, sings, raps, dances, etc will never be able earn anything but trival sums from doing so even under the current legal regime.
It's worth going to read Macaulay's speeches from the early nineteenth century to see how little what copyright supporters claim as the intent of copyright was seen as such at the time these ideas were being rendered into law.
https://ia601406.us.archive.org/34/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.2... beginning at p 156/pdf page 180
Yeah, and a lot of that was either amateurish or in the thrall of some wealthy elite (either the creator was an elite themselves, or directly dependent on them).
> And somehow people have come to believe that without it, creation will cease.
Come on, you're being black and white about it? Without copyright, will it stop? No. Will it change, for the worse? Probably. More paid for and catering to the whims of the wealthy, far less "middle class" creation, and almost no "middle class" professional creation, etc.
If anyone could duplicate the whole universe at will, of course current human laws would all seem as silly as those covering random virtual monopoly on cognitive experience possibilities.
In its current form, it is absolutely rent seeking. We will be dead and buried long before our culture enters the public domain. The so called "stakeholders" have systematically robbed us of our public domain rights.
Limit copyright duration to at most 20 years and it will still be a disgusting monopoly on numbers, but at least it won't be intolerable. We might actually forget that we can use technology to trivially copy stuff at negligible costs.
Here, if any pair of countries have conflicting rules then you simply can't expose your service to both because it's plain impossible for you to block all means of VPN/proxy regardless of how perfect your service tries to detect it. There's no payment, there's no account, there's no anything - you're just serving DNS to an IP that reports to be out of Germany according to German law. At some point it stops being a mistake/malintent of the company and one of the user. Where that transitions probably depends on the person though.
Yes, and Quad9 could have done better in the German court case. At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency, and then could have ensured that their DNS service is offered only to registered users.
This would have been a massive burden to them, and (as we have seen from the ongoing data leaks) a gigantic privacy risk to its users. It would have also been a big overreach, as the German ruling would have mostly impacted non-German users.
If you can solve this for me it would actually help a lot at work :D
A recursive DNS resolver is identified just by an IP address for your system level DNS resolver to use (eg. in /etc/resolv.conf). Even if you assigned a random, secret IPv6 address for every individual user, they could simply share that with anyone else too. In IPv4, pretty much impossible.
Again, I don’t endorse that framing. But that’s where a lot of lawmakers are at. They’re not corrupt or fascists or hysterical about porn or whatever (well, plenty are, but not most). They’re trying to correct what they identify as a dangerously uncontrolled area.
Yes. This is also how physical products work. The internet makes it easy and the default to offer a service worldwide, hence also making it easy to get in conflict with the law worldwide. You have to pick and choose which laws to break, which laws to comply with by minimizing exposure, and which laws to comply with by making a tailor-made version for a specific market.
If I make a product in my country, where it’s legal, and a buyer purchases it from me and then brings it to you overseas where it’s illegal, and someone in your county tries to sue me for it, they are typically going to have a hard time. (Unless your country is powerful enough to violate the sovereignty of my nation.)
In most cases, you accessing my website is more like this scenario. Intermediaries (ISPs) brought you the product. I simply offered it to anyone who came to my “store” (server). I admit that this dynamic changes if you directly pay me for something.
Your framework implies that every social website needs to make a decision on whether or not users are allowed to insult the Thai monarch[0], and then must block access to Thais if they decide it’s allowed. In reality nobody does this, although they may choose not to put a server in Thailand if they are worried about it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9_in_Thai...
'Ofcom told the BBC: "We are aware of this lawsuit. Under the Online Safety Act, any service that has links with the UK now has duties to protect UK users, no matter where in the world it is based."
A service doesn't have to be based in the UK to be subject to the act, and therefore face action from Ofcom.'
The US-based lawyers for the services in question take a very different view....
Hm yeah but "action from Ofcom" doesn't really mean very much to a party half a world away.
Manifestly, the British still think they are a world power.
Offering a website to a certain country is not something ISP decided for you, but you actively did that yourself. I cant create a gambling website and host it in Monaco and then serve it to someone in CA and say that, it isnt on me, but on Comcast.
Websites aren't broadcasting, they are waiting there and responding to requests. Why should it be on every server in the world to have to figure out whether they're allowed to respond to a given request based on the client's country?
Why is it not the user's responsibility to not send requests? Why isn't it the ISP's responsibility to not route the requests? And every single router in between?
Defendant's lawyer argued that seeding a copyrighted movie was not (active) distribution but merely "making it available" (which was not associated with a criminal offense in HK law as opposed to "distributing infringing copies").
Didn't work out.
---
[1] HKSAR v Chan Nai Ming [2005] 4 HKLRD 142
My point is it's weird to expect website operators to be aware of every jurisdiction on the planet and take steps to comply with each of them.
If that expectation becomes common, the obvious way to go isn't to block the countries you aren't allowed to serve. It's to only allow the ones you know you are allowed.
Imagine how the internet would be if you were default blocked from accessing any website hosted in a different country.
It's a difficult issue for sure. It's almost a geopolitical problem -- the larger economic blocs (eg. EU, China, USA) can basically dictate terms and expect general compliance (eg. GDPR) because most companies can't avoid operating in those areas, while smaller countries can't really do much unless they're part of a bigger economic bloc.
And actually you can just make a gambling website overseas, people have done that since forever. You might have trouble with accepting payments, though.
Except the analogue to your ISP for your example is UPS and they are far less (if at all?) responsible for the content of packages they deliver.
Now if I keep sending banned materials to your country, it might be a bad idea for me to travel there. But nothing else is going to happen, unless you’re a global power and you drone me or compel my government to extradite me. (Or if my own country was foolish enough to make mutual extradition agreements for such things.)
(Note, I specified in person in cash above because as I mentioned before, electronic payments make things messy. But most websites are “free”.)
EDIT: Look at that, downvotes but no rebuttals. (:
Anything can be reduced down to 'dumb' if you try hard enough. Officer, these are just chemicals in a specific quantity and just goes boom when mixed together.
Try explaining top level authoritives, ttl, DoH etc etc to a lay person. Yes, it is example.com in, a.b.c.d out but it is anything but simple.
My larger point is calling "phone book" doesnt make DNS dumb.
While it is indeed 20 years ago, it should not be forgiven, if they continue to pull off shitty things like this lawsuit.
Young assholes replace old assholes, and on and on it goes.
Companies culture tend to degrade over time, rarely improve.
It's perfectly faire therefore to requiere overwhelming demonstration of good faith to invalidate such a massive bad behavior.
They Never did So they deserve the PR hit.
Which honestly they didn't take nearly as much as they should have.
Stop defending the billion dollars corps. They have proved over and over they are not our friends.
At best our interests are temporarily aligned.
People working for them are not innocent either. They know the company past, they signed their contracts, and stayed despite the culture.
There is such thing as free will, they have their responsability too.
The "a few bad apples" argument is old and tired now. And the "not all People have a choice" have been repeated a nauseam.
Sony once was a great company. Excellent electronics, great service.
Then they became a media empire...
Japan is just quiet about it. Sony is no aberration.
My theory was 'the death of the internet'. Once everyone has been scammed, once everyone has been hacked and stripped naked in public, when there are more lies than truths, when you are the tool and the computer uses you, when everything has been sold and you have nothing: then you would say, this was a mistake.
Actually, I don't know much about the history of the internet. The Sony stuff is before my time. Now you mention this, perhaps the idea that the internet was designed to be beneficial was actually a total lie.
Or perhaps they are just planning to physically withdraw any operating presence in France, so as to not have any facilities, equipment, or employees who are located in French jurisdiction.
But it wasn't clear from the article, unless I missed it.
My guess is that they brought Germany example of doing GeoIP as the model they'll use but mostly noted as a fun quirk that even that solution received a weird challenge which they managed to fight off (at cost, though).
Obviously, it'd be nice to get a direct response from them as it is unclear.
> beIN, a Qatari company with offices in France, previously sought to force Quad9 to block resolution for a set of domain names they assert are participating in copyright infringement of its audiovisual rights on sports event broadcasts.
This seems to be the relevant wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIN_Channels_Network
...it's like going after the independent printshop who printed your local telephone directory book to redact known ne'er-do-wells from the directory because a local weed drug deal took place 5 minutes ago but the next telephone directory print isn't scheduled for another 6 months.
also, doesn't DNSSEC prevent this anyway?
There's a youtuber who breaks down samples in songs by hip hop artists, and he gets striked or all his earnings taken by someone who stalks his videos, he used to cut samples to below 15 seconds, and still gets striked. You can't even defend yourself, and arguably he is within FAIR USE of the content.
Someone, somewhere is going out of their way to strike their videos. It's ridiculous, do they strike news channels when copyrighted music plays in the background without their control too?
What is being discussed would be more like if a court tried to get Google to take down individual spam bot youtube accounts that had popped up that same morning. Its rediculous because the legal system doesn't move that fast (nor does DNS), so things that require that level of heavy-handedness are typically much slower processes taking months or years.
Yes, they do. In Brazil, to avoid some news reports about stores selling contraband items, the store owners started playing Disney songs in the background, meaning they weren't able to publish the videos or broadcast them.
Things are pretty dire, attention-wise.
It could always be worse, like here in Spain, where they got one court order a few years back, and just arbitrarily block half the internet (i.e. all of Cloudflare) whenever the futbol is on...
I have zero awareness of when futbol is on because I hate sports. So I didn't correlate it.
As per usual, the answer is no. DNSSEC prevents resolver cache poisoning for trusted resolvers which validate DNSSEC. That is literally it. It provides no security against the vast majority of attacks against DNS.
Also limited protection against MitM upstream of the resolver, spoofing is prevented but denial of service is still possible.
It's like prosecuting the asphalt guys who paved the road the bank robbers used
While trolls are awful, something like trolls can always exist in a free society. The root problem here is the French courts enabling the trolls with unworkable rulings. Both the French and Italian justice systems have a history of making some clueless and even incoherent rulings which are never corrected.
Of course, we weren't liable for failing to block any VPN address not on the list, but we also weren't allowed to not block an address that was on the list, which resulted in customer complaints.
The point is that they want to use these cases to get global blocks in place. Geoblocking a single country from accessing content that country wants blocked is not doing everything that could be done. They could remove access to that content for all users everywhere, then the block could not be circumvented
I'm not saying that is what they should have done or should do or that they should give in to any of these situations, but that is the end goal of someone like Sony in these cases. They want to block it in the territory in question, yes, but truly the purpose of these laws is to apply those rules and controls globally
> Canal+ has been busy getting web-blocking injunctions in France against sports piracy sites which stream sporting events for which it has the exclusive broadcast rights within the French market. It previously targeted DNS resolvers operated by Google, Cloudflare and Cisco.
> All three unsuccessfully opposed the web-blocking orders. Google and Cloudflare, therefore, have been forced to instigate them. However, Cisco just pulled its OpenDNS service out of the French market entirely.
(Per https://completemusicupdate.com/quad9-vows-to-fight-absurd-w..., https://completemusicupdate.com/opendns-pulls-plug-on-france...)
Attacking the people doing the actual bad things is hard, attacking a single unified organization is easy.
It's not about if it makes sense from a moral point of view.
Edit: not to mention that even if you were to steal a book and not pay for it, copying is kind of a victimless crime, as no one lost anything.
I believe the position of the French government is that anyone in the path of a crime can be ordered to block the part of the crime that relates to them, without having any liability for the crime. So quad9 are not criminals for not blocking pirate sites, but still have to block specific sites when ordered.
But using a third party DNS circumvents the block, so they went after them too.
Web browsers however (unless they include a VPN or 3rd party DNS) don't allow you to access sites blocked by your ISP. Same goes with ethernet and wifi cards.
I'm not saying I agree with it but that's the logic.
It's one thing to say that you can't CNC machine guns for customers of your CNC-on-demand service, it's another to say you can't sell CNC machines because someone might use them to make guns.
Here the DNS service is being told they can't direct traffic to pirate sites, not that they can't give out tools (e.g. browsers or local DNS resolvers) that could be used by someone else to direct traffic to pirate sites (or could be used innocently). Your examples are all the latter - tools.
And yet some places (California for instance) are attempting to do just this by requiring some kind of vaporware AI mediator to review files before the machine operates. Intermediary liability is out of control.
It's not illegal to sell these because it would be illegal for the end user to make a gun with them (it might or might not be - but is irrelevant) - it's just illegal to sell them because the legislator said it is.
This same trend is happening all over, from banking to communications to manufacturing, where private industry is deputized by force to police consumer behavior, without consumers receiving any of the usual protections provided by the legal process. We’re effectively witnessing the construction of a privately mediated police state.
Granted, that's the theory.
When the demands come from a company on the basis of copyright/intellectual property (that is, exclusive broadcasting rights), one can feel less comfortable about this affair; even thought the judgement mentions that the case is backed by the ARCOM, the french authority for broadcasting, which should instead IMHO deal with a couple or two of private TV channels that are obvious vectors of fake news.
But, this is the same copyright that can protect you when you publish programs, source code, images, etc., even when you use a free and open license; the licence has meaning thanks to the copyright.
Copyright enforced at this scale, for the profit of a corporation that streams their content off the infrastructure paid for by the public, does make one less comfortable.
And exclusive broadcasting rights… why is that a thing and conflated with copyright regulations? Why would the public regulator charge, say, 1M€ for the steaming right to something that will net 20M€ in advertising? That’s not really about copyright, I’d argue that it’s actually the job of the public channels to stream this content that takes place on stadiums built with public funds, streamed via a largely public TV system, etc.
I suppose the work against sports piracy is profitable enough to continue. Canal+ makes quite a lot of money, and their subscription in France is pricey compared to most other services.
They could, for starters, split the sports bundle and lower its price. Lots of people would probably pay a little bit to watch sports in 4K, instead of hunting for shady streaming websites that do 720p at best.
Delay updates by 1 week.
Answer randomly with the up-to-date or the out-of-date records.
The problem is that these types of companies are started by naive idealistic techs who only know how to play by the rules and can't figure out why people would misuse their products
They were very well described by the "rubber hose crypto" XKCD
(Not that I don't think a DNS company stays at the same level of complexity - both legal and technological - as a VPN company, but still)
"The problem is that these types of companies [kitchen knife manufacturers] are started by naive idealistic [craftsmen] who only know how to play by the rules and can't figure out why people would misuse their products [by stabbing people]."
Or companies that sit between tricky legal and technical questions without having f-you money but especially lacking on f-you legal advice
(One thing about these founders is that they also have a hard time understanding context and follow-up questions)
I feel like you're purposefully being sarcastic.
...also, it's probably their own PlayStation, that their kid uses. Speaking from personal experience.
That kind of action would penalize their users far more than it would hurt the evil corporation that slighted them. Not to mention they'd lose users. People who choose quad9 likely aren't too keen with DNS tempering.
But yeah, take that sony-or-whatever!
unless someone could still use emudhra certs
He is, obviously, not French.
His self-claimed annual income was about $15–25 million, and his personal wealth was about $70–100 million.
To be clear I dont think they should comply with the block, but i didn't grasp how they're going to block everything if they dont have a way to only block some things.
They want to be out of reach of French courts basically.
Though I guess if they stop operating in France entirely, there will simply be nothing left to sue, even if the company still exists elsewhere.
And the only way to do that is via GeoIP blocking…
so you operated in germany and your "tricky" way to follow the regulations did not work. if you dont resolve to german customers at all, like you dont exist then nobody can theoretically say you are operating in german. so that is the difference for me.
At first yes, but ultimately the blocking order was undone by a higher German court in December 2023.
Did that work? Hell no, piracy sites just moved elsewhere. But big soccer is slowly ruining the internet and all the EU governments are letting it happen
BeIn is owned by the Qatari state, who just so happen to own Paris St Germain.
Their owners Yousef Al-Obaidly and Nasser Al-Khelaifi (for both the network and the club) are outspoken about piracy and 'the damage it causes football and creative industries'.
They've also been in and out of court a fair bit on corruption charges, and seems they've paid their way out of trouble through fines. Seems just last month a new case opened:
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260920-psg-president...
Nation state meddling, dodgy characters, corruption and greed is more of a threat to football than a DNS resolver, tbh.
video link: https://youtu.be/fUrNOVjWUVM?si=koBbVj67CxfMhncC (skip ahead to the second half of the video).
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...
Aren't that is about the same?
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...
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.
Quad9 is a Swiss-based not-for-profit organization whose operational budget comes entirely from sponsorships and donations.
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.
Yeah, fuck those billionaire authors and artists in coffee shops not wanting people to rip off the books and art they create without compensation.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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...
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).
they already have.
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?
I share the opinion that DNS is a purely technical system part of running the Internet. That DNS is attacked is only out of convenience rather than solving whatever actual problems the actors in question are facing.
In case of copyright infringement claims as in this article, the way to solve this is to deal with the criminals, not terrorize the road network that gets you to them or burn phone books just because it's "easiest".
Why is it that this so often is excused on the Internet? My theory is that it's because the inner workings of Internet is opaque to the common user; a takedown notice via a DNS redirect will look to an end user as if law enforcement got to the criminals themselves, so they get away with it. Even if they didn't because they did a too poor work, were too lazy or didn't want to spend the resources. But these factors shouldn't result in attacking others' valid business models for it and instead result in either accepting your situation or changing your situation.
Honestly, this is a possibility.
beIN, like any Qatar based company, is majority owned by the state. Qatar is infamously rich in oil with the state able to subsidize luxury lifestyles for citizens it deems worthy.
France needs oil, like any other country. So if a journalist could follow the money. Could probably find where the pressure was applied within the government.
The rich using archaic copyright laws to get their way has been modus operandi for quite awhile. Seen this applied both in USA and abroad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrods
And by contrast, Selfridges (among other chains) is owned jointly by a Thai conglomerate and the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund.
Europe does not have free speech in the first place.
French authorities and network operator will in fact prefer that you don't have alternative than using the dns servers that they are providing.
So it sucks that Quad9 is closing their resolver to french IPs. If they stand by their values, they should continue to accept the requests, just leave all office and business ties with France.
Similar to ofcom things against 4chan.
I transmit a radio signal in Dover that can be picked up by radios in Calais, the message it carries happens to be illegal in France ("Brittany is still part of the UK", say). Could I be taken to court in France? I'm guessing no.
I knew courts were dumb, but didn't think they were this dumb.
"The neighbour's dog bit me, so they put up a fence. I climbed over it and got bitten again. The fence doesn't count."
So remove 9.9.9.9 BGP announcements? Unless France wants to build a great firewall... a Ligne Maginot du DNS, I don't see how this is enforceable. The internet is not Minitel...
I didn’t attempt find the ruling; perhaps the lawsuit was written in an odd way.
The most common configuration for non-recursive DNS servers is with forwarders. The DNS server accepts queries and simply forwards all of them upstream to another resolver, which... makes its own recursive queries.
It is simply not feasible to avoid having recursive resolvers in the chain of lookups. That's how things work with DNS.
In any case, if all resolvers these days are recursive why mention it?
I know this is far from the most important question on the topic of this thread!
When? I didn't get online until the 90s, but resolv.conf delegating recursion to some other node was the way of the world back then. And still is. Some people do run a recursive resolver locally, but it's not so common afaik.
> In any case, if all resolvers these days are recursive why mention it?
Quad9 is named as a recursive resolver in contrast to being an authoritative server. Quad9 and the server I run for my domain are both DNS servers, both provide name resolution, but one is recursive and the other isn't. Used to be, you might run one server for both jobs, but that fell out of fashion for good reasons.
IIRC there were some trusted lists of "well known" hosts that were passed around between administrators. DNS was invented because that obviously became impractical quickly as the internet grew.
I see how that could work against a service claiming to give users the DNS lookups they expect
International companies always have to make a decision: Follow the local rules or leave the market. Unfortunately most companies follow local rules, even if that means obeying the rules of a dictatorship, because money doesn‘t stink. Exceptions are very rare.
Sums it up. Applicable basically for any court anywhere.
I'm confused
they "cannot" blacklist the domains on geoIP basis, yet the "can" withdraw from France? via what method? Removing the French servers is clearly insufficient, so why can they deny France entirely via geoIP, but not block the domains just via geoIP?
they do claim a value-based reason (good on them for it), but they are very very insistent about the "impossibility" anyway. can't have it both ways.
Okay, now waiting to see how they will technically block those french users from the 24th nov onward...
Yes, by leaving french jurisdiction.
> or serve your citizens
This is not necessary. At all.
Stay Swiss, my friend.
>We eventually won that case against Sony, but it took several years, six figures of cost to Quad9, and massive wasted time – all of which set us back in our ability to deliver services and is a resource debt we are still paying for today
Shame on you, Macron. What a loser guy. Big words but these are just lies. We really need to no longer put our future into the hands of any politician here. Direct democracy is the only way forward past this point. Courts that work for foreign countries need to be removed. Courts must work, first and foremost, for the local people living in a country.
This is some fucked up level of incompetency.
That’s why Justice can be abused by whoever got the most money, if it was competent they wouldn’t waste much time on these ridiculous claims.
And nobody would pick a piracy list, why'd you do it as a user.
You can use 9.9.9.10 - it has no filtering.
But even malware filter is supposed to cut malware, not pirated content. Cutting piracy while saying that you cut malware is def lying because pirated resources might not provide anything malicious for the end user.
They say they don't have data about individual IP addresses, and their report is follows their privacy policy. Yes, right, but think about it as a matter of principle. Normally, a privacy focused service shouldn't collect any data, but for technical or legal reasons, sometimes, they have to. They may need to know how many queries they have and from which zones to properly dimension their infrastructure for instance, so it is normal for them to have these logs, but publishing them in a blog post just to make a point feels like they are ready to use collected data beyond their intended purpose if it serves their interests.
Legally, it is fine, and is is unlikely to hurt anyone, but on principle, that's a red flag.
I don't find it disturbing at all, and it's perfectly in line with what you would expect a privacy focused service to do: name and shame those that are attacking privacy.
Many of these probably against it and expect privacy, that's why they are using quad9. They are the victims here.
If they had said "this service is used by this or that proponent of the legislation", your point could stand, even though I still disagree.
Also, it is about blocking, not spying, still bad, but orthogonal to privacy.
Just absolutely braindead behaviour from so many members of our species.
Quad9 already states that they strongly oppose piracy, so just block the sites. The piracy sites will be fine.
I don’t think DNS is as neutral as Quad9 believes it is. DNS is like the sign for a business on the road and the domain registrar is like the building permit you get to build the sign. DNS is a way to find a website or business without even bothering with a search engine. Try typing in stamps.com, office.com, booking.com, weather.com.
There's really no reason not to.
> €580,000 to €1,000 per day. But deleted his/her comment.
To put this into perspective, €365K a year is roughly the fully loaded total comp cost of a high-senior to low staff level software engineer or a mid level ML engineer at a frontier lab in Cali.
Copyright infringement isn’t exactly a violent crime but it is very clearly a crime.
What I don’t think Quad9 realizes is that being neutral from a technical and architectural basis is meaningless in law and doesn’t reflect your intent. If you have awareness and means to make a change that mitigates harm and you refuse, that’s how you lose cases.
I think it can be very easily argued by a lawyer that Quad9 intended to keep the infringing content easily available and at best minimally comply.