Your DNS resolver just left a country. Do you know where yours lives?
Quad9 is exiting France over legal pressure. Get a 2-minute audit of your actual DNS resolution path — which resolver you're really using, which jurisdiction it answers to, and the exact command to switch.
Free audit · Paid full report $9 · Team pack $49 · No VPN affiliate links, ever.
Why DNS Resolver Jurisdiction Matters Right Now
On October 23, 2026, the public DNS resolver Quad9 announced it would withdraw its service from France after sustained legal pressure. The thread on Hacker News gathered more than 970 upvotes and 351 comments, and the discussion quickly moved past the news itself into a more uncomfortable question: if a resolver can be pushed out of one country, what stops the same pressure from reaching the resolver my machine is talking to right now? Most people have never checked. They assume they are using the resolver their operating system shipped with, or the one their router was configured with years ago, or the one their ISP quietly substituted.
Existing tools do not answer this question well. DNS leak test sites tell you that your resolver is visible, but they stop there — they do not tell you who operates it, where it is registered, which legal jurisdiction it answers to, or what to do next. Cloudflare's help pages only recommend Cloudflare. Quad9's own documentation explains Quad9's policy, but it is the subject of the debate, not a neutral decision aid. Privacy Guides publishes a static list of recommended resolvers, but a list is not a personalized audit of your actual path. None of these tools combine resolver identification, jurisdiction mapping, encryption status, and a copy-paste migration command in one place.
The window is what makes this urgent. Public attention on resolver jurisdiction spikes for roughly 48 hours after an event like the Quad9 withdrawal, then decays as the news cycle moves on. The people who care about this are technical users and small-team operators who are already reading the thread — they want a concrete answer today, not a think piece next month. ResolverAudit exists to give them that answer while the question is still on their mind.
How It Works
Identify your real resolver
We probe your actual resolution path from the browser and from a lightweight edge endpoint, then compare the result against what your operating system claims to be using. This catches router-level hijacking, ISP substitution, and stale configuration that a settings screen will never show you.
Map the jurisdiction and encryption
Every identified resolver is matched against a hand-maintained table of registration countries and known legal-pressure events, including the current Quad9 and France situation. We also check whether DoH or DoT is active or whether your traffic has silently fallen back to plaintext port 53.
Get the exact switch command
Your report ends with two or three verifiable alternative resolvers, each labeled with its own jurisdiction, plus a five-line copy-paste script for macOS, Linux, and Windows. Every script is reversible, so you can roll back in one command if anything breaks.
What You Get
See the real path
Not the resolver you think you configured — the one your traffic actually reaches. The audit traces each hop from device to router to recursive resolver and flags any substitution along the way, so router hijacking and ISP overrides become visible instead of assumed.
Jurisdiction map
Each resolver is labeled with its registration country and any known legal-pressure events, including the Quad9 withdrawal from France. This is the dimension no leak test or recommendation list covers, and it is the one that decides whether your resolver can be compelled to log or hand over queries.