Are VPNs legal in Belgium? The law, and the blocking fight that reached the world's DNS resolvers

The previous version of this page talked about Belgian data retention and streaming in general terms and cited nothing. This version replaces it, because Belgium earned a real reference page: between 2025 and 2026 it became, after France, the main battleground over whether a national court can force the world's public DNS resolvers, Google's 8.8.8.8, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 and Cisco's OpenDNS, to censor their answers country by country. Cisco's reply was to switch OpenDNS off for Belgium entirely, twice.

What people bring to this page is one question in a few forms: is a VPN legal in Belgium. The short answer is yes, without qualification. The longer answer is worth setting out rule by rule, because Belgium blocks a lot, and the way it blocks explains why the question keeps being asked. Every row below carries its source.

Are VPNs legal in Belgium?

Yes. Using a VPN is legal in Belgium, selling one is legal, and no Belgian statute places any duty on the person using one. Belgium blocks websites through court orders and an administrative fast track aimed at intermediaries, and none of those instruments restricts the person using a VPN. Here is where each rule actually sits.

Every obligation in that table lands on an intermediary: an access provider, a DNS resolver, a host. Not one row makes the person using a VPN do anything or risk anything, and Belgium has never gone where Italy went, down the chain to the viewer. The other thing the table shows is Belgian persistence: when DNS blocking at the ISPs stopped working because people switched to public resolvers, Belgian courts followed France's May 2024 lead and put the public resolvers themselves under a standing order, then defended it on appeal.

What has Belgium actually blocked since 2011?

The chronology below is the record I could document, from the first Pirate Bay order to the resolver fight. It matters for the VPN question because every instrument on the list works at the DNS or network level inside Belgian infrastructure, which is exactly the layer a VPN tunnel does not touch.

The story those 17 rows tell is escalation at one chokepoint. Fifteen years of Belgian blocking practice runs through DNS, from the 2011 Pirate Bay order to the 2025 resolver orders, and each escalation happened because the previous layer was trivially avoided. The resolver fight itself started in France, with Canal+'s May 2024 orders and OpenDNS's French exit; what Belgium added is durability, the first resolver order to survive its full court challenge, on August 20, 2026, and the second national market Cisco preferred to abandon rather than filter. And in all of it there is not a single measure against a VPN provider or a VPN user: the Belgian system regulates the pipes it can reach, and a VPN tunnel, which carries its DNS lookups inside the encryption to an endpoint outside Belgium, is simply not one of them.

Does Belgium watch internet users?

Less than most, and its courts are the reason. Belgium is the EU's stubborn test case on data retention: bulk retention laws were annulled in 2015 and again on April 22, 2021, each time for ignoring the EU Court of Justice's ban on keeping everyone's traffic data just in case. The current law of July 20, 2022 keeps traffic and location data for six, nine or twelve months depending on local crime rates and threat assessments, a design its critics call bulk retention with extra steps, and its third trip to the courts is under way: the Constitutional Court sent the law to Luxembourg, and on September 3, 2026 Advocate General Szpunar concluded it cannot stand without stricter safeguards. What sits in the retained records is who connected to what and when, not content. A VPN reduces that record to a single visible counterpart, the VPN server; our table of retention laws in 16 jurisdictions shows where Belgium's 12 months sits internationally, in the middle of the pack and under far more judicial control than most.

How does Belgium compare with France and Italy?

The three neighbours make a neat spectrum. Italy built a standing administrative machine, Piracy Shield, that names VPN and DNS providers as blocking addressees and has started fining viewers; the record is in our Italy legality and Piracy Shield reference. France runs blocking through courts but has extended orders to public DNS resolvers and, since May 2025, to five named VPN providers, documented in our register of website blocking in France. Belgium sits in between: judicial and administrative blocking as aggressive as anyone's against sites and resolvers, but nothing addressed to VPN providers and nothing aimed at users. For the everyday side, Le VPN has a server location in Belgium among servers in more than 100 locations, allows 10 simultaneous connections and comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee; the VPN for Belgium page covers use at home and abroad.

What changes next?

• Cisco's next move. After the August 20, 2026 ruling, Cisco announced OpenDNS would leave Belgium a second time; reports differ on whether it stays in the proceedings to fight on. Together with the parallel French litigation, this decides whether resolver blocking becomes a stable European instrument.
• The three-month compliance clock. Google, Cloudflare and Cisco have until late November 2026 to implement blocking under the modified order, with the FPS Economy's September 7, 2026 guidance setting the details.
• Case C-661/24. The EU Court of Justice's judgment on the 2022 retention law will follow the Advocate General's September 2026 opinion. A fourth Belgian retention rewrite is possible.
• The gambling blacklist. 985 domains and growing by batches every few weeks; the count is worth rechecking at each update of this page.
• Resolver scope creep. The newest piracy orders spared DNS resolvers while the litigation runs. If the appeal confirms the duty, expect rights holders to put resolvers back into every future order.