dns0.eu

» see dns0.eu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

dns0.eu was a free public DNS resolver for the European Union, built by the two people who had already built NextDNS. You pointed a phone or a router at it instead of at Google's 8.8.8.8 or Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, and your lookups stayed on European infrastructure under European law, with no logs kept and a filter sitting in front of the known-malicious domains. It launched in 2023 and it was switched off in October 2025.

The case for it was jurisdictional before it was technical. Every lookup your device makes is a plaintext record of where you are going next, and across most of the world those records pass through two American companies that give the service away. Romain Cointepas and Olivier Poitrey built the alternative on infrastructure spread across every member state, running a software stack already proven at NextDNS, and handed it over for nothing. There was a default service with threat filtering and a stripped variant with none, plus a version with a family filter on it.

I sit outside the edge of this one by design, and the design said so on the homepage. The promise printed there was to protect the citizens and organizations of the European Union, and Turkey is not in the European Union. The resolver answered anybody who asked, so nothing stopped me from putting dns0.eu into a router in Ankara. But what the product actually sold was jurisdiction, and that part stayed in Europe.

~ the case file ~

~ sixty-two servers ~

The front page carried the numbers, and they were small enough to be honest: 62 servers in 55 datacenters, spread over 27 European cities, answering at a median of 12 milliseconds across the fleet. Set that against the anycast networks Google and Cloudflare run, which are counted in hundreds of locations worldwide, and the scale of what two people were maintaining comes into focus. It was enough. DNS is a cheap protocol to answer and an expensive one to answer reliably, and the fleet was rented rather than owned, spread across multiple hosting providers with a presence in every member state.

~ who pays for a resolver ~

A free public resolver has no revenue model that does not compromise it. Logging the queries and selling them is the obvious one and is the precise thing the product exists to avoid. Charging for it removes the reason most people would ever switch. Google and Cloudflare can run theirs at a loss indefinitely because the goodwill and the telemetry are worth more to them than the hosting, and because the hosting is a rounding error against their other bills. Nobody else is in that position.

So the funding question was open from the first day and never closed. dns0.eu ran on donated and discounted infrastructure, with threat intelligence contributed by European security firms and national CERTs, and the closing notice thanked those partners by name. What it could not find was a way to pay for the time. Two founders were running a free resolver for a continent in the hours left over from the company that paid them.

~ four days in october ~

The Internet Archive brackets the ending to four days. The full marketing site, thirteen kilobytes of it, was captured for the last time on 14 October 2025 at 20:41 UTC, still selling in the present tense. The next capture, on 18 October at 11:44 UTC, is 1,010 bytes and carries the notice instead. The trade press reached it between 22 and 25 October, which means the notice had been sitting there five or six days before anyone wrote it up.

The notice does not perform anything. It says the service has been discontinued, that keeping it running was what they wanted but that it was not sustainable for them in terms of time and resources, and it recommends switching to DNS4EU or NextDNS. It closes by thanking the infrastructure and security partners who made dns0.eu possible. The second recommendation is their own company, which reads as self-interest until you notice that the first one is the European Commission's funded project, and that pointing users at it was the graceful move available.

~ what stayed online ~

The headstone held for a little over a year. By February 2026 the domain was serving a Gandi page reading dns0.eu is unavailable. Today the name does not resolve. DNS4EU, the Commission's own resolver, went live in June 2025 and is still running, which leaves dns0.eu as the volunteer version that arrived two years early and closed four months after the official one opened. Whether that counts as a failure depends on which of the two you think was the point.

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