Tried Quad9. Torrent sites blocked. Removed Quad9 and switched back to Cisco (dnscrypt was a requirement). I cannot tolerate censorship when I'm a grown up adult. I'm 90% sure this is Quad9 choice and not influenced by Sony.
You could also use Quad9's unsecured DNS to check if it was blocked by their list or if something else was going on.
Try dnscrypt-ip4-nofilter-pri
$ dog thepiratebay.org. a @9.9.9.9
A thepiratebay.org. 5m00s 162.159.137.6
A thepiratebay.org. 5m00s 162.159.136.6
$ dog eztv.re. a @9.9.9.9
A eztv.re. 5m00s 104.31.16.120
A eztv.re. 5m00s 104.31.16.9
$ dog yts.mx. a @9.9.9.9
A yts.mx. 5m00s 104.31.16.9
A yts.mx. 5m00s 104.31.16.120NB I have a slightly different setup - I run Unbound locally and route DNS requests through the 'suitable machine' on VPS over VPN established by my LAN router. I considered moving the resolver there but didn't yet found the setup what would be usable for me when I would be out of my LAN. Opening my resolver to the whole world is the way to be a part of the bot relays for DDoS attacks, so this is out of question.
Root servers only control the mapping up to the TLD. That is, they for instance know the nameservers for ".br", but they know nothing about the nameservers for ".com.br", or about the domains below that. If your domain is "example.com.br", the nameservers which could "just take it down" are the nameservers for ".com.br", not the root nameservers. In the same way, the root servers are completely unrelated to domain registrations (other than pointing to nameservers which know about them).
As long as it’s a static IP and the server is still there, you’d still have access as long as you had that mapping.