Comment by assumed_throwaw

14 hours ago

Unfortunately, Quad9 is censoring some domains in Europe (notably in France and Italy) following injunctions issued by rights holders [1]. That was not the case with Mullvad's DNS.

[1] https://quad9.net/news/blog/italian-blocking-demands-followi...

> The German courts entirely disregarded our use of geo-IP lookups on queries, and asserted that since tests via a VPN were able to resolve the domain, we were in breach of court orders

Seriously, what the fuck? So you're supposed to block VPNs as well? What's next, Tor exit nodes? New VPN and Tor nodes as they pop up? I really don't like where this is going.

  • What's even worse: the court fined us because they claimed this use case was in some way in contempt of their ruling. Then, when we won the overall case, that money was never returned because it wasn't specifically referenced by the final court. The response from the lower court was effectively: "Well, you will need to sue the court to get that money back." <table flip>

    Edit: I'm with Quad9 (CTO)

    • The hubris of the courts can be stunning. Sorry from Germany.

      And thanks for the great DNS service, I'm using it everywhere!

  • German federal LE agencies have been doing it for years. Threatening to put you on lists of wanted and sanctioned individuals as a basically islamic suicide bomber for not taking down tiny things globally.

    That kind of thing isn't unheard of for police agencies with moral and oversight issues, though. Orgs start seeking for bigger reasons. A simple copyright issue creatively expounded into an imaginary global drug bombing cyber trafficking crime ring takedown creates a massive internal win. So they do that.

  • >So you're supposed to block VPNs as well? What's next, Tor exit nodes? New VPN and Tor nodes as they pop up?

    Trivial to do nowadays: https://focsec.com/

    >I really don't like where this is going.

    German courts think the internet revolves around German laws. There are some really insane cases, sometimes they will consider a website to fall under German jurisdiction simply for having a German-language version (somehow ignoring that Austria and Switzerland exist, ignoring German-speaking minorities in other countries, ignoring that a fully automated translation in 100+ languages is now possible at the click of a button).

  • There's some irony in Germany using censorship for the purpose of ensuring people don't get into reading materials that might convince them to become... fascists who censor people

    • There is no irony. The German government is proto-fascist, and has been for a while, as are several other European governments. Apparently the UK now arrests more people per capita for online speech than China does.

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