A DNS resolver built with European Commission funding and marketed as a sovereignty-first alternative to American infrastructure has been ordered by a Paris court to block dozens of domains linked to pirated streaming. The April 17 ruling against DNS4EU - operated by Czech cybersecurity firm Whalebone - marks another step in France's systematic expansion of broadcasting rights enforcement beyond traditional internet providers. The orders, secured by French broadcaster Canal+, target pirated streams of two major international motorsport events and remain in effect through the end of their respective broadcast seasons.
How France Widened the Circle of Liability
France's approach to piracy enforcement has shifted considerably since 2024. Initially, blocking orders landed only on residential internet service providers - the most direct conduit between users and infringing content. The Paris Judicial Court then began extending those obligations outward, reasoning that if alternative technical routes remain open, blocking orders are easily circumvented and largely symbolic.
Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco were among the first third-party DNS operators required to block pirate domains through their own resolvers. VPN providers followed. So did search engines. Each expansion was driven by the same logic: piracy enforcement is only as strong as its weakest bypass route. Article L. 333-10 of the French Sports Code provides the legal foundation, permitting injunctions against "any person likely to contribute" to remedying infringement - language broad enough to capture intermediaries well beyond conventional internet access providers.
By March 2025, the court had adopted a bundled approach, issuing simultaneous orders across multiple intermediary categories in a single proceeding. The April 17 ruling followed the same pattern: 18 separate orders issued on one day, covering ISPs, DNS resolvers, VPN providers, and other services. DNS4EU became the newest name on that list.
A Default Judgment Against a Project Built on Sovereign Principles
DNS4EU was co-funded by the European Commission and launched formally in June 2024. Its stated purpose is to give European internet users a DNS resolver that is private, safe, and independent from non-EU commercial operators. That positioning - as a trustworthy public-interest infrastructure - makes its absence from the February 19 hearing particularly striking. The Paris court issued its rulings as default judgments: Whalebone filed no defense, presented no technical objections, and offered no legal challenge.
The Swiss non-profit Quad9, which operates a comparable privacy-focused resolver, also defaulted in a parallel ruling issued the same day. Other intermediaries took a different path. Google, Cloudflare, NordVPN, Surfshark, and ProtonVPN all contested the blocking requests. The court rejected their arguments regardless. Technical objections - including concerns about cost, encryption constraints, and general monitoring obligations - were dismissed for lacking "quantified and verifiable" evidence. An earlier appeal by Google and Cloudflare failed, and a request to refer the underlying legal questions to the EU's Court of Justice was turned down as well.
DNS4EU has not publicly explained its decision not to participate in proceedings. Whalebone did not respond to requests for clarification. That silence is notable given the organization's positioning as a transparent, accountable European alternative to commercial DNS operators.
The Blocking Is Already Active - and Appears to Cross Borders
The two orders against Whalebone require DNS4EU to block 16 domains linked to pirated MotoGP streams and 21 domains linked to Formula 1 broadcasts. The targeted list includes services such as antenawest.store, daddylive3.com, iptvsupra.com, king365tv.me, sportzonline.live, and smartbox-tv.com, among others.
Testing of DNS4EU's public resolvers from outside France confirms that blocking is already in effect. Several targeted domains return SSL certificate errors rather than resolving normally. Users who proceed past those warnings encounter an explicit blocking notification - one added this week - confirming that DNS4EU is complying with the French court's order.
What makes this technically significant is that the block does not appear to be geographically confined to France. Users in other EU member states are reportedly encountering the same restrictions, which would constitute overblocking under the terms of an order that explicitly applies only to "French territory, including all overseas territories of France." Whether this is a deliberate configuration choice, a technical limitation of DNS4EU's infrastructure, or simply an oversight remains unknown. Whalebone has not responded to questions on the matter.
The Broader Tension Between Enforcement and Infrastructure Values
The DNS4EU case crystallizes a tension that is unlikely to resolve itself quietly. DNS resolvers sit at a fundamental layer of internet infrastructure - they translate human-readable domain names into the numerical addresses that route traffic. Requiring them to selectively withhold those translations is technically straightforward, but it creates a version of the internet that differs depending on which resolver a user has chosen, and potentially depending on where the resolver's operators are domiciled.
For a project explicitly built around European digital sovereignty and privacy, compliance with a national court's blocking order - especially one that appears to affect users outside the ordering jurisdiction - raises questions that go beyond piracy policy. It touches on what "sovereign" infrastructure actually means when courts in one member state can shape how a pan-European service resolves domain names for users in others.
France has moved faster and further than most EU jurisdictions in applying broadcasting rights enforcement to third-party infrastructure. Whether other member states follow, and whether EU-level institutions eventually weigh in on the legality or proportionality of this model, will determine how far these obligations ultimately extend - and which other EU-funded projects may find themselves named in the next round of orders.
