Is France… ok?

Allowing private corporations to have the ability to block what is seen on the internet seems to us to be a dangerous and infinitely deep problem.

Is a great quote, and gets to the heart of the issue.

There are more important reasons geoIP blocking will not work. We already prevailed in a similar legal case in Germany in 2021-2023 in which we learned an important lesson: we tried to use geoIP blocking as a “hack” in a similar circumstance at the start of the legal proceedings, allowing us to continue services in Germany until the case concluded. The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.

A very “fuck you” to Sony, once again, as well.

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. Quad9 has no association with these domain names, nor with the operators of the websites. The French courts have fundamentally misunderstood the working of the internet and the role of the domain name system and have allowed a financial penalty to apply to Quad9 if we do not block DNS responses to users in France.