Are you not reading what I am saying to you?? Once again, your explanation is INVALID because that would mean that gnupg would be BROKEN, because it would be a NON-COMPLIANT http client according to the RFC I quoted.

Also might I add, this used to work perfectly fine in gnupg14. It seems that somewhere along the line a regression was introduced that is causing this erroneous non-compliant behavior in the HTTP client.

Why? Your explanation is invalid because it implicates dirmngr's HTTP client as not comforming to the spec laid out by the RFC. I've quite clearly explained--and backed up with the spec itself--that when a proxy variable is configured, a client should not be doing DNS lookup of the destination hostname. Is there something about that you are not understanding?

Yes you can, and no you do not. Don't believe me? Then read the spec. At no point does the spec say that there is "nothing that can be done" when a hostname cannot be resolved when connecting through a proxy. In fact, it states precisely the opposite, describing the exact procedure a client should take when making a request through a proxy. See section 5.3, paragraph 3:

So if your DNS resolver does not tell us the IP addresses, we can't do anything about it.

A workaround for this until the HTTP client is fixed is to just use curl instead:

I am running into the same exact issue. It seems that dirmng is incorrectly attempting to resolve the addresses for the keyservers despite having been given an HTTP proxy to connect through.