Brussels upholds DNS-level blocking for DAZN: Google and Cloudflare must comply, OpenDNS quits Belgium

On 20 August 2026 the President of the French-speaking Business Court of Brussels rejected the core challenge brought by Google, Cloudflare and Cisco against Belgium’s first resolver-level blocking order, as reported by TorrentFreak on the basis of the implementation decision published by Belgium’s anti-piracy department on 7 September. The order, obtained by sports rightsholder DAZN in April 2025, requires the three companies to stop resolving pirate sport-streaming domains through their public DNS services — 8.8.8.8, 1.1.1.1 and OpenDNS — in addition to the ISP blocks that were never controversial.

What the court held

The court found that blocking at alternative DNS resolvers is technically possible, that the companies failed to show disproportionate costs, and that the risk of geolocation errors near Belgium’s borders did not tip the balance. The reasoning is explicitly about closing the loophole: imposing the measure on “the main alternative DNS resolution service providers helps strengthen the effectiveness of the blocking injunction imposed on ISPs” — because the first thing a blocked user does is switch resolvers.

The DNS providers took some points. The requirement to redirect users to a warning page was scrapped as inapplicable to resolvers. The €100,000-per-day penalty survives but counts only on days DAZN broadcasts live matches, capped at €20 million per company, and under-blocking caused by “an exceptional geolocation error” is excused.

The operational template

The implementation decision reads less like a judgment and more like a product spec — which is exactly why it matters beyond Belgium. DAZN may submit one blocklist update per week, up to 100 new domains, naming the matchday at least seven working days ahead; resolvers get five working days to implement; and the blocks activate 90 minutes before kickoff, intermittently, “so that users find it more difficult to anticipate the blocking and plan around it”. The list has already grown from 58 domains at issue to 258.

Cisco’s response is the starkest data point: the company told the court that selective, geolocated, dynamic blocking “would compromise the performance, stability and security” of OpenDNS, and that the only measure it is technically able to implement is pulling the service out of Belgium entirely — for the second time. The anti-piracy department accepts the exit as compliance. Google and Cloudflare, which already geofence their answers for French and Italian orders, comply in place. Cisco intends to appeal; resolvers have three months to implement.

The resolver layer becomes the chokepoint

Belgium is not an outlier — it is the middle of a trend line. Paris courts ordered the same three companies to block pirate sports domains for Canal+; Italy’s Piracy Shield operates IP-level blocks on a 30-minute clock; and in Washington, H.R. 10364 — filed the same week — explicitly reaches public DNS resolvers. Public resolvers answer queries worldwide with one policy per domain, which is precisely why rightsholders keep aiming at them and why the operators keep warning that a local order can have global effects. Geofencing — answering differently based on the user’s location — is the uneasy compromise holding that tension together, and Belgium just ruled that occasional geolocation error is an acceptable cost.

What this means for you

For sports and premium content rightsholders, the Belgian decision converts resolver-level blocking from an experiment into a proven, repeatable remedy in Europe: a rolling weekly list, match-day activation windows and per-day fines make it operationally real, not symbolic. The template is portable, and DAZN’s win will be cited in every similar application across the EU.

For everyone else who owns domains, the same machinery deserves respect: rolling blocklists that grow by 100 domains a week, assembled by private rightsholders and enforced under fine pressure at infrastructure level, will produce mistakes — and the Belgian order explicitly tolerates “exceptional” geolocation errors. Knowing whether your domains, or domains impersonating you, appear on such lists is becoming part of routine brand hygiene.

Counsel’s note. Most rightsholders read decisions like this and conclude the answer to piracy and impersonation is a blocking order of their own. Blocking is a distribution disruption, not a removal: the infringing service stays online, rotates domains, and waits for your list to lag. The working method pairs the two rails — use blocking where live-event timing makes disruption valuable, and attack the durable layer (host, registrar, CDN account, payment rail) to take the operation down, not just out of sight. We broke the infrastructure side down in our guide to finding the real host behind Cloudflare.