The European non-profit DNS service DNS0.EU has ceased its activities. The organization, which focused on secure and privacy-friendly DNS resolution within the European Union, says it is discontinuing the service due to a lack of time and resources.
The official DNS0.EU website now only displays a short announcement:
The dns0.eu service has been discontinued. We would have liked to keep it running. It was not sustainable for us in terms of time and resources. We recommend switching to DNS4EU or NextDNS. We sincerely thank all our infrastructure and security partners who made dns0.eu possible.
The team itself has thus confirmed that the project has been permanently discontinued.
DNS0.EU was founded in 2023 by Romain Cointepas and Olivier Poitrey, who were also behind the DNS provider NextDNS. The initiative was intended as an independent European alternative to commercial DNS services such as those offered by Google and Cloudflare, with an emphasis on privacy, security, and GDPR compliance. Among the partners were Abuse.ch, known for its malware prevention projects, and registrar Gandi.net.
Child-friendly version
The service offered two versions: a standard version and a child-friendly version. The standard service blocked malicious domains used for typosquatting, cryptojacking, or automatically generated malware domains. High-risk top-level domains and misleading IDN domains were also actively blocked. The child-friendly version went further by blocking access to pornographic, gambling, and piracy websites, as well as advertisements, dating services, and explicit search results. Even platforms such as Twitter and Reddit were inaccessible via that version.
DNS0.EU ran on a distributed infrastructure with servers in all EU member states and supported modern security protocols such as DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS, and DNS-over-QUIC. The service was known for its low latency and strict no-logs policy, which was fully in line with European privacy legislation.
The organization refers users to two alternatives, writes BleepingComputer. DNS4EU, co-funded by the European Union, and NextDNS. DNS4EU is easier to set up and offers protection against fraudulent or explicit content, while NextDNS offers more detailed filtering options for privacy, security, and parental control.
Digital sovereignty in Europe
With the disappearance of DNS0.EU, Europe is losing one of the few public DNS services that operated entirely within the European infrastructure and focused on digital sovereignty and user protection according to European standards.