Neutral infrastructure is being squeezed out by liability
Quad9, the privacy-focused DNS resolver, is exiting France after court orders to block content. Commenters compared it to punishing the phone book company for listing a criminal's number. One thread cited a German case where Sony Music used a VPN to reach blocked content and the court sided with Sony. Separately, eMudhra announced it is leaving the global SSL/TLS certificate business, and the first comments were mocking: 'You can't fire me, I quit.' A related thread notes that Docker pulls fail in Spain because La Liga's anti-piracy blocks hit Cloudflare R2 whenever a match starts.
The pattern here: running a layer that other people build on is turning into a legal and reputational risk. Courts and rights holders go after whoever is easiest to reach, not whoever is responsible. Fines scaled to a company's revenue can be existential for a small operator. Larger providers like Cloudflare absorb the blowback, and their customers suffer as collateral.
The nuance: the eMudhra story is more about a weak CA reputation and thin margins than about regulation. Not every exit is political.
So what?
If your product depends on DNS, CDN, certificates or a single registry, you carry hidden jurisdictional risk. Plan for fallback providers and regional failure modes, and check where your vendors can be forced to block traffic. If you run infrastructure yourself, budget for legal exposure before you scale.