Link: https://quad9.net/news/blog/au-revoir-france/

Starting November 24, Quad9 will no longer be able to offer its free cyberprotection service to users located in France.

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.

Is France... ok?

nope... but it's been cleansed by fire apparently

https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/additional-options/dns-over-tor/

As explained in the blog post ↗︎, the preferred method is DNS over HTTPS (DoH), which encrypts the entire DNS query within an HTTPS connection.

Going to require blocking Tor in France at the network level if the French authorities want to block someone from using something like DNS-over-HTTP via Tor.

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.

But the French authorities are idiots. So there's no win to be had, here.

Maybe deep packet inspection to drop any traffic that happens to be in the French langauge.

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.

Fundamentally even with TLS enabled and encrypting your DNS queries your ISP can still see what websites you are going to. Not what your doing on those sites, but they can see a visit to those sites.

Here's a video that shows what your ISP can still see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNdeOpu9BoE

Sony uses a VPN to spoof its location outside of the geoIP blocking area, and then is surprised it can access a blocked site? WTF

Judge somehow does not see the distinction, or understand location spoofing at all.

Does Q9 even have a presence in France? How would they enforce this fine?

With ECH it can only see ip addresses. Which may be enough in many cases of course, but many sites use CDNs. Not all sites use it though.

Authoritarian enough government would just block connections with ECH and force websites to disable it of course.

Yes, only the state should have the ability to do that.

So many judges, lawyers and even lawmakers have no idea how the technology that they’re legislating even works. It’s a major problem.

So, if Quad9 has admitted that geo blocking is insufficient when it comes to complying with bans, and that they were hit with a fine for doing that previously; how are they actually supposed to not provide services to french users anymore?

how are they actually supposed to not provide services to french users anymore?

I guess because they are not selective regarding the domain being queried, but only by the client IP address. It cannot be said anymore that it is only blocking access to specific sites.

Spain would be floating away if France wasn't here to anchor it to Europe, or maybe they could put a big rope instead, but then they might have Germany as a neighbour....