We have been ordered to block certain sites related to the XT.com and CoinEx services
In April 2025, in response to a pair of lawsuits that L'Autorité des marchés financiers (Quebec’s financial markets regulator) brought against XT.com and CoinEx, the Superior Court of Québec ordered a list of TSPs including TekSavvy to block access to those services in Canada. You can read the orders here: Autorité des marchés financiers c. XT.com Exchange, 2025 QCCS 1287, and Autorité des marchés financiers c. Coinex Global Limited, 2025 QCCS 1288.
Since the plaintiffs specifically named TekSavvy as one of the TSPs on the order, we are required to block the listed sites.
This order is similar to earlier ones that were issued against GoldTV sites and Soap2Day sites, although those concerned copyright and these new orders concern the regulation of financial markets. TekSavvy vocally opposed the GoldTV order and appealed it to the Federal Court of Appeal and finally to the Supreme Court of Canada. We appealed because, among other things, we see blocking orders as a violation of network neutrality and a fundamental change to what we do as a TSP. The principles of common carriage and network neutrality mean TSPs carry traffic to and from end users in as neutral a fashion as possible. All TSPs should defend the basic principle that we are not liable for or responsible for the content of the traffic on our networks. Unfortunately, our appeals were not successful and there has been a proliferation of site-blocking orders as a result. You can read more about our efforts to oppose these orders here.
Technical Information
Finally, to ensure we are operating in as transparent a manner as possible, here is some technical information about how we are doing this blocking. Under the XT.com and CoinEx orders, TSPs can use DNS blocking or DNS rerouting to prevent end users from accessing the blocked sites. TekSavvy is using DNS rerouting by changing TekSavvy's DNS server to point these domains directly to an informational page provided by the Plaintiffs, instead of where other neutral and unaffected DNS servers point.
