Belgian court upholds pirate football blocking on public DNS resolvers

Google, Cloudflare and Cisco have lost their challenge to the Belgian order that makes public DNS resolvers block pirate football streams. On 20 August the president of the French-speaking Business Court of Brussels rejected the core of their case: alternative resolvers can technically block domains, the companies did not show the cost is disproportionate, and the risk of catching users near the border through geolocation errors does not change that. The order, obtained by the sports broadcaster DAZN, keeps its fine of 100,000 euros a day, now counted only on days when DAZN matches are broadcast live and capped at 20 million euros per company. Belgium's anti-piracy department published the implementation rules on 7 September and TorrentFreak reported them on Thursday: up to 100 new domains a week, blocks switched on 90 minutes before kick-off, five working days for resolvers to load each update. Cisco told the department it will pull OpenDNS out of Belgium for a second time rather than build that into its service, and says it will appeal.

What the court decided

The ruling itself has not been published; what is public is the anti-piracy department's implementation decision of 7 September, which summarises it. Three points carry the weight. First, the judge found it technically possible for an alternative DNS resolver to block domains, which was the companies' central defence in April, when Cloudflare's counsel called the DNS measures "very specific" and technically problematic and Cisco said the procedure "lumped too many things together". Second, the companies failed to show that the cost would be disproportionate. Third, the department's decision explains the logic: "Imposing a blocking measure on the main alternative DNS resolution service providers helps strengthen the effectiveness of the blocking injunction imposed on ISPs", and the combination is meant to "discourage users seeking access to unlawful content, as their experience as consumers of football matches, which they are very attached to watching live, will be disrupted". That last sentence is the design principle of the whole scheme. The blocks are intermittent on purpose, switched on an hour and a half before kick-off so that "users find it more difficult to anticipate the blocking and plan around it in advance". The order covers Belgian competitions including the Jupiler Pro League; DAZN can file one list update a week of at most 100 domains, with no fixed calendar. The resolvers have three months to comply. The court also handed the companies two concessions: no obligation to show a warning page, since that cannot be imposed on a resolver, and no fine for underblocking caused by an exceptional geolocation error.

Why Cisco leaves and Google and Cloudflare stay

All three companies fought the order; only one is walking out. Google and Cloudflare complied with the original 2025 order in their own ways, withholding answers for the listed domains from users their systems place in Belgium, and the new ruling changes nothing for them. Cisco's position is that OpenDNS "does not allow for the implementation of selective, geolocated and dynamic blocking as required by the order", that adding it "would compromise the performance, stability and security of that service", and that leaving the country is the only measure it is "technically able" to implement. The department accepts withdrawal as compliance. It is the same choice Cisco made in France in 2024, when a Paris court ordered the big resolvers to block sports pirates for Canal+, and in Portugal; the pattern is that the company with the smallest consumer footprint in a country opts out rather than build the machinery. That machinery is the story. A resolver that geofences its answers for one court will be asked to do it for the next, and Google's own submission to the European Commission this summer argued that DNS and VPN blocking is ineffective and harmful precisely because every block is trivially routed around and every added layer breaks something for someone else. Brussels heard the same argument and answered that inconvenience is the point.

What changes for a viewer in Belgium

Until now the standard workaround for a Belgian ISP block was to point the router or the phone at 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 and carry on. That door is shut for the domains on DAZN's list, and it shuts on a schedule designed to be unpredictable. What remains is not exotic. A resolver you run yourself, on a home server or a rented box, answers from the root and has received no order; a VPN moves the DNS lookup and the traffic to another country, where the Belgian list does not apply. Neither is illegal in Belgium: the order binds intermediaries, not viewers, and it says nothing about VPNs. It is worth being clear-eyed about what the order protects, too. The sites on the list are pirate streams; DAZN paid for the rights and is entitled to enforce them. The cost of the enforcement method is what the three resolvers argued about and lost: a national court has now confirmed that it can tell a global resolver what to answer, and the department's own text says the goal is to make watching harder rather than to make the streams disappear. For anyone who uses a public resolver for reasons that have nothing to do with football, privacy, speed, malware filtering, the lesson is that the resolver's answers are no longer only a function of the internet. They depend on which country the resolver thinks you are in and what its courts have said that week.