Paris Court Rejects Canal+ Fines Against Cloudflare Over 1.1.1.1 Piracy Blocking

The court's conclusion rested on statistics that Canal+ itself provided, according to the report. Cloudflare does block the sites in question through its content delivery network, and the court accepted the company's position that the DNS resolver is a separate service.

Cloudflare has said for years that it does not interfere with its DNS resolver. In its recent transparency reports, the company stated that it has not blocked any content through 1.1.1.1 despite orders issued by courts in France and Italy. "To date, Cloudflare has not blocked content through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver," the company's latest report reads.

Blocking through the CDN follows a different track. According to the same report, Cloudflare geoblocked 1,238 domains in France in the second half of 2025, all under a single court order. In the first half of the year, it geoblocked 662 domains under seven orders.

Cloudflare set out its position to the European Commission in a submission to the Commission's Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, arguing that global public DNS resolvers should not be used to block or restrict access. It instead pointed to its real-time pirate stream blocking program, which lets vetted rightsholders flag pirate streams carried over its network. Those streams are disrupted "within seconds," Cloudflare says, without blocking any DNS or IP address.

"For live content, where speed is crucial, Cloudflare has built real-time mitigation mechanisms that allow vetted rightsholder partners to flag infringing streams. When those streams are running through our network, we act on them in seconds," Cloudflare told the Commission.

For now, Cloudflare can continue to block the sites through its CDN while the 1.1.1.1 resolver remains unchanged. Canal+ can still appeal the rulings, so the matter may return to court.