Ordered to block sports sites, anti-malware DNS service Quad9 pulls out of France

“This is only goodbye, France”: that is the title Quad9 chose to announce its departure on October 22. Starting Tuesday, November 24, 2026, this free DNS resolution service will no longer answer users located in France. DNS is the directory that translates a website's name into an IP address. Many users choose Quad9 because it also refuses to resolve known malicious sites.

The cause: a ruling by the Paris judicial court (tribunal judiciaire) issued on October 21, in the dispute between Quad9 and beIN Sports. The organization refuses to block domain names that it neither owns nor manages.

From women's tennis to a daily penalty

The case began on May 13. Acting on a petition from beIN Sports France, the court ordered Google and Quad9 to block, in France and at the level of their DNS servers, a list of websites and Internet television (IPTV) services that stream the WTA women's tennis tour. The block was to last until November 14. According to Next, Quad9 appealed without applying the decision, and beIN restarted the proceedings in September.

On October 21, the court set a penalty of €1,000 per day of delay, until the end of the tournament. beIN had demanded €10,000 per day and per domain name or subdomain still accessible, which comes to €580,000 per day by Quad9's calculation. The organization estimates the bill at €24,000 by November 14, excluding legal fees. It also mentions about twenty other proceedings under way.

So the amount is not the heart of the problem. Quad9 considers compliance “technically infeasible” and contrary to its public-interest mission. “We categorically refuse to alter or lie to you about the DNS answers you receive,” it writes. It says it has no list of its users and no reliable way of knowing where they are. Its appeal is proceeding.

The OpenDNS precedent

This is not a first. As Next points out, OpenDNS, Cisco's resolver, had already left France in 2024 after a similar ruling obtained by Canal+. Two foreign resolvers have thus chosen to give up on French users rather than apply the blocks demanded by sports rights holders.

What to do if you use Quad9?

Companies and individuals use Quad9 as a free filter against phishing and malware, sometimes without knowing it, because a provider configured it at some point. You have one month to take stock.

• Find where Quad9 is configured: home router, firewall, internal DNS servers that forward queries to it, workstations, phones, the “secure DNS” option in browsers.
• Do not count on Quad9's unfiltered addresses (9.9.9.10 and its secondary addresses): they will also be cut off in France.
• Choose another resolver, checking whether it filters malicious domains and what its privacy policy is. Quad9 points to a public list of resolvers.
• Switch before November 24, so you don't risk losing Internet access overnight.

What comes next will play out before the court of appeal, on a date that is not yet known. Until then, the block ordered in May is due to end on November 14, ten days before Quad9's announced departure.