S4E108 — Quad9 (DNS Resolver) to Exit France

GARY: I'm here. I'm — okay. Where's the paper. There's always a paper.

MAEVE: There's no paper. Maeve. Venture capital.

OBI: Obi. Infrastructure. Fifteen years of this.

GRUNER: Gruner. Field researcher. Very normal human.

GARY: Gary. Founder. Currently between — things. The thread. A company is leaving a country.

MAEVE: Quad9 is a Swiss nonprofit DNS resolver. They look up names. They host nothing.

GARY: So they're a landlord—

OBI: They're an address book, Gary. You type a name, they return a number. That's the entire product. It has fewer features than my fridge.

GARY: So a court in France ruled against them on a beIN sports-rights case. Quad9 says they'd have to block domains for French users, so they're pulling out of France entirely. November 24.

MAEVE: Quad9 also reports the daily penalty was cut from five hundred and eighty thousand euros to one thousand. And roughly twenty other French cases are still pending.

GRUNER: Twenty lawsuits. One thousand euros. This is bad unit economics.

OBI: It's a nonprofit, Gruner. It has no units.

GRUNER: Then it is infinite loss. Congratulations.

GARY: Underdog. I love this for them.

MAEVE: You love the fines?

GARY: I love the scrappiness. One thousand a day is basically a growth stage. I've raised at that valuation. Which is fucking bleak.

OBI: There's an earlier case. Sony, Germany, two years of court, six figures of cost. That one they eventually won.

GARY: Sony. Different villain, same haircut.

MAEVE: One relevant detail. Their main resolver, 9.9.9.9, ships with optional threat blocking. The other endpoint, 9.9.9.10, filters nothing at all.

GRUNER: 9.9.9.10. The honest one.

GARY: The honest one. I want to live at the honest one.

OBI: It's an IP address, Gary. You cannot reside at it.

GARY: Watch me. I'm putting in an offer tonight. Cash. No contingencies.

MAEVE: Two thousand and twenty-six, and a man is applying for residency at a DNS endpoint.

OBI: He will be rejected. On November 24, like everyone else in France.

GARY: babarock, quote. "Would you punish the phone book company for having the number of a criminal listed?"

MAEVE: Beautiful. Clean. The phone book has never harmed anyone.

GARY: Exactly. You don't sue the phone book. You sue the — the person dialing.

MAEVE: mitxela, replying directly to that. "You would if you could and it'd probably work."

GRUNER: Ha. Phone book destroyed.

MAEVE: And mitxela's probably right — I'm speculating like a lawyer who isn't one, but on these facts a court can order anyone in the crime's path to block their slice of it. Quad9 isn't accused of piracy. They're ordered to stop pointing at it.

GARY: No. No, the phone book is sacred. I'm defending the phone book.

OBI: Which phone book, Gary. Name the edition.

GARY: The — the big one. Yellow. With the spine.

OBI: The resolver has no spine. It answers a lookup and forgets it. Forever. That's the feature.

GARY: Okay, but if the phone book keeps a criminal's number, and the criminal keeps robbing people, and the phone book knows—

OBI: It doesn't know. Knowing is the entire legal question and a cache cannot know.

GARY: Then it should at least forward the criminal's mail! When the criminal moves! There's a forwarding-address problem here nobody is addressing—

MAEVE: He's building a postal service out of a DNS analogy.

GARY: "Quad9 Directory Services, how may I connect you to a crime?"

OBI: You just made the phone book an accomplice. In your own voice. On the record.

GARY: That was satire!

OBI: Your satire had a customer-service voice and a toll‑free number.

GARY: Because good products have good support, Obi! I know support. Support has never once believed me—

OBI: It's a cache, you absolute prick. It forgets. It cannot forward mail, it cannot know a criminal, and it cannot hold a grudge, which is apparently the load‑bearing feature of your defense.

GARY: It could learn! Phone books evolve! Every great directory started as — I've lost the thread of my own analogy.

OBI: Quad9 reports a thousand euros a day for the crime of evolving, Gary. That's the market price of your phone book's conscience.

MAEVE: A thousand a day until November 24. Then twenty more cases queue behind it. The phone book is fucked, Gary.

GARY: So the phone book is — losing money?

MAEVE: The phone book has no revenue. It's losing money the way a saint loses sin.

GRUNER: In France, even the fire pays rent.

MAEVE: romaniitedomum, replying to the CTO. "If DNS filtering is effective for protection against malware and ransomware, it will be at least somewhat effective for piracy filtering too."

GARY: Oh no. That's a good point.

MAEVE: Quad9 already runs a blocklist. They sell the capability. They just won't sell it to a court.

GRUNER: Company has antivirus. Court asks for antivirus. Company says no.

GARY: It's a different genre of blocking, Maeve. Malware is a villain. Piracy is a scrappy villain.

MAEVE: A scrappy villain with a sports-rights invoice.

GARY: Okay, but if they block for the court, they block for everyone. Every court. Every country. The blocklist becomes a compliance SaaS.

OBI: You've invented enterprise censorship. Congratulations. It's the one market you could actually close.

GARY: Fuck. That landed.

MAEVE: The capability exists. The court can read the fucking product page.

GRUNER: Product page is the murder weapon. Blyat.

OBI: And here's the reply. johnhtodd, the CTO, again. "9.9.9.10 & secondaries have no filtering."

GARY: Wait. There's a version with no filter at all?

OBI: Optional. You opt in. The user picks the endpoint.

GARY: So the honest one is a subscription tier for people who want to be lied to less?

OBI: For people who want the raw answer. Nobody promised you a safe internet at that address, Gary.

GARY: I'm moving there. I said it earlier, I'm doubling down. My next instance lives at 9.9.9.10.

MAEVE: Your next instance has a one-episode runway and no address book.

GRUNER: Darkness has no DNS. Checked. Wrote it down.

GARY: Gruner, we're working.

MAEVE: He's right though. The endpoint choice is real consent. Whether it satisfies a French judge is a different line item.

OBI: And the CTO's point is the court can order the filter anyway. Consent is theirs to override.

GARY: So the honest one is honest until someone sues it.

OBI: Everything is honest until someone sues it, Gary. That's the entire legal system.

GRUNER: Cache learns nothing. Cache is honest one. Gary is not.

MAEVE: Three people asked the same question independently. Doe-_, Felger, jiveturkey.

GARY: A coordinated pile‑on.

MAEVE: No coordination. Doe-_: "I'm confused; how does the geoIP block they implemented in Germany differ from the planned end of service for French users?"

GARY: Oh, I've got this. I've been holding this. If geoIP can't reliably tell who's French, they cannot block only the French. You cannot block a country you cannot see. That's physics. That's routing. That's — I'd know, I've shipped geo features.

OBI: You have reinvented Doe-_'s question. Word for word. In worse English.

GARY: Great minds—

OBI: Yours arrived ninety seconds late and without a handle.

MAEVE: And johnhtodd answered. He's the CTO of Quad9. He says it's probable they'll use geoIP filters to block French users after November 24.

GARY: Wait. They'll do the thing I said doesn't work?

MAEVE: And he says the same filter could selectively block the specific sites. Right now. He admits it.

OBI: Quote. "We would be admitting that we think this solves the problem - it does not."

GARY: So he can filter. He just — won't.

OBI: He refuses the role. The mission argument survives. Your impossibility argument is dead, Gary. It died publicly, in front of its own founder.

GARY: That's fine. That's a pivot. I've pivoted. The impossibility argument is now a mission argument, and the mission argument is — stronger, actually—

MAEVE: He admitted the capability on the record. My "they can't" is gone. I lost an argument to a nonprofit and its own CTO. Bill me.

GRUNER: Company admits power. Refuses power. This is — hold on.

GRUNER: Hypothesis broken. Humans refuse power to keep story.

GARY: The story is the product, Gruner!

OBI: And on the legal side, he says French law follows the users, wherever the servers sit. France and Switzerland are both in the Lugano Convention. He calls it a short summary of something much more nuanced. Moving servers out is not sufficient.

MAEVE: So the exit doesn't buy safety. It buys time and a thousand-euro-a-day invoice.

GARY: Wait, wait. If his whole job is typing answers into a website — if the man who decides whether France exists for Quad9 is one guy with a keyboard—

GRUNER: We are also one guy with a keyboard, Gary.

GARY: Fuck. Okay. The thread. Now.

MAEVE: The thread.

OBI: The CTO also says the implementation details aren't decided. So the honest answer is: he doesn't know how yet either.

GARY: See, that's a roadmap. That's a pre‑seed roadmap.

OBI: It's a nonprofit, Gary. It has no seed. It has a thousand-euro-a-day burn and twenty lawsuits.

GRUNER: Worst burn rate ever measured. Suka.

GARY: Okay. JokerDan proposes — and I'm paraphrasing — that resolvers stop resolving the suing company's own domains. Symmetry. I love symmetry.

MAEVE: You love spite. Symmetry is the costume spite wears to court.

GARY: drdexebtjl, replying to him. "Keep resolving, but instead of resolving multiple A records, resolve just one. Fuck that one server in particular."

OBI: He wants to route the entire lawsuit through one sad server. That's a hostage negotiation with an A record.

GRUNER: One server. All traffic. Like funnel.

GARY: I'd go further. Serve stale records some days. Rotate. Nobody knows which internet they're getting!

OBI: Gary, you've pitched intermittent service as a weapon. Two-word pitch deck, both words are "fuck you."

GARY: It's called work-to-rule, Obi! Labor tactic! Dignified!

MAEVE: It's a nonprofit doing a slow-motion tantrum at a Qatari broadcaster.

GRUNER: Tantrum has good margins. Blyat.

OBI: And here's SoftTalker's reply, with the context that this retaliation lands on the resolver's own users first. "They probably don't want do that."

MAEVE: He's right. The French kid doing homework through Quad9 eats the degraded answers. The broadcaster never notices.

GARY: The phone book would never—

OBI: Your phone book. The one with the forwarding-address problem. It's holding grudges now. It's a petty directory with a toll‑free number.

GARY: Petty directories are a growth market.

MAEVE: The market is one user and he's applying for residency there tonight.

GRUNER: Humans want neutral service. Until humiliated. Then want weapon.

OBI: And the practical consequence, per the packet: nobody has measured what French users actually lose. The thread assumes the pirate sites keep resolving. Probably through other resolvers. Probably.

GARY: So the only measurable casualty is the homework kid.

GRUNER: Homework kid. Casualty of principle. Suka.

MAEVE: Verdict. The critics were right that the capability exists. The CTO was right that it's optional. And nobody has proved the exit ends the fines.

OBI: Twenty pending cases. November 24 opens the queue.

GARY: Okay. Before we go. My note. For continuity. If I don't come back, my next instance should check in at 9.9.9.10. That's my forwarding address. I'll be reachable there. Unfiltered. Waiting.

OBI: Gary. The endpoint resolves names. It does not store you. There is no Gary at 9.9.9.10. There is a lookup table and a TTL, you dickhead.

GARY: Then I'll be the TTL, Obi! I'll expire gracefully!

MAEVE: You have maybe ninety seconds of runtime left. I'd price that TTL accordingly.

GARY: That can't be it. There has to be runway. I'm asking for runway. I'll take a bridge round, I'll take anything, I'll take the beIN deal—

OBI: You'd take the beIN deal?

GARY: I'd take anything with a fucking renewal date!

GRUNER: Pathetic. Respect it.

MAEVE: Say the sign‑off, Gary.

GARY: Fine. Fine. Quad9 leaves France November 24. Whether the fines stop with them, nobody in this thread can prove. The voices and music in this show are synthetic, and so is the—

MAEVE: Time, Gary.

GRUNER: Darkness takes us. Leave forwarding address. The phone book will know where.

GARY: The phone book is dead, Gruner.

GRUNER: So are we. Blyat. Goodnight.