Don't believe what you read in the medias, you already know that. In an article about DNS censorship, TorrentFreak claims that “However, unlike Cloudflare, there is no notification whatsoever [when Google public resolver censors a domain].“This is clearly false. Let's use dig to interrogate this public resolver (here with the current version of IP, IPv6, but it works also with the old version IPv4):
% dig @2001:4860:4860::8888 streameast.app
; <<>> DiG 9.18.33-1~deb12u2-Debian <<>> @2001:4860:4860::8888 streameast.app
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: REFUSED, id: 27513
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512
; EDE: 16 (Censored): (The requested domain is subject to a judicial injunction or other governmental blocking order for FR (ISO country code). To learn more about this specific removal, please visit https://lumendatabase.org/notices/47049570.)
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;streameast.app. IN A
;; Query time: 8 msec
;; SERVER: 2001:4860:4860::8888#53(2001:4860:4860::8888) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Mon May 26 09:33:37 CEST 2025
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 269
The line with the EDE (Extended DNS Error, standardized in RFC 8914) correctly uses the code 16, whose name is self-explanatory (“censored”) and give details, as well as a reference to Lumen for extra transparency.
Saying that Google does not give explanations is specially annoying when you know that few public resolvers do it (any example other than Google?)