A court ruling requires Cisco, Google and CloudFlare to block access to more than a hundred sites. Canal+ is behind it, in its war against sports piracy.
“Due to a court decision in France”
Some might see it as a way of swatting a fly with a bazooka, others a way of responding to ” to the requirements of those with all rights “. The official reason is given by OpenDNS in a blog post:
« As of June 28, 2024, due to a court decision in France issued under Article L.333-10 of the French Sports Code and a court decision in Portugal issued under Article 210-G(3) of the Portuguese Copyright Code, the OpenDNS service is currently unavailable to users in France and certain French territories and Portugal. We apologize for the inconvenience. ».
Canal+ obtains DNS blocking of around a hundred sites
The court decision in question was published by our colleagues at l’Informé. It asks Google, Cisco (owner of OpenDNS) and CloudFlare to block access to a hundred sites, via their DNS resolver. In concrete terms, Internet users using the DNS of one of the three services no longer make the link between the domain name and the IP address of the server.
For Canal+, this involves protecting its rights and making sites broadcasting Champions League, Premier League football and Top 14 matches inaccessible. After obtaining the blocking by access providers and the delisting by Google of several illicit sites, Canal+ decided in October 2023 to move up a gear by this time assigning Google, Cloudflare and Cisco “, explain our colleagues.
In the court’s decision, published by our colleagues, it is stated: ” The proportionality of the requested blocks is contested by the defendants. Google, Cisco and Cloudflare claim that these measures would be unnecessarily complex and costly since there are many other ways to block all access to the disputed sites. Furthermore, the infringements in question would not be irremediable since it would be sufficient to use a VPN or another alternative DNS service to circumvent the block. “. These and other arguments were rejected by the court.
OpenDNS returns a “REFUSED” message
If we try to query the DNS resolver in France or Portugal, we now get a nice “REFUSED” message, with a reminder of the legal text in question. As DNS specialist Stéphane Bortzmeyer points out, ” this is not specific to the requested domain name, all give the same result. In addition, we can verify, for example with the RIPE Atlas probes, that it is the same for almost all French ISPs ».
CloudFlare also ran with now a message ” Error HTTP 451 […] Unavailable For Legal Reasons “. At Google, the error message is more succinct: “ Hmm, we can’t find this site. ».
DNS resolvers galore
Stéphane Bortzmeyer is very angry about this court decision: “ Proponents of intellectual property often claim that it serves to “protect creators,” but as seen here, it mainly serves to enrich football clubs. The people who used OpenDNS were probably doing so to circumvent censorship that mainly benefits rights holders. “, or even because their connected objects were based on OpenDNS, which is not without consequences.
The Internet and DNS infrastructure specialist takes the opportunity to point out that in Europe there are other DNS resolvers: dns.sb, DNS4ALL, FDN’s and even his own. We can also add Quad9. He adds: ” If you use a public resolver (which is not necessarily a good idea), the choice is vast and the alternatives numerous (no reason to all go to the resolver of a large American capitalist company). But it is not easy to choose ».
