Increasingly, countries, especially in Europe, have been enforcing strict measures lately to halt the spread of pirated content. Yet, Cloudflare, a leading DNS server provider, told TechRadar that “network blocking is never going to be the solution. “
DNS providers were the first to be targeted with blocking orders and lawsuits by French, Spanish, and Italian authorities. However, these authorities have now begun targeting some of the best VPN services on similar grounds. Technologists, however, have long warned that these tactics lead to disproportionate overblocking incidents while undermining people’s internet freedom.
“Those kinds of network blocking efforts are having collateral effects and are ruining the internet,” Vice President and Global Head of Public Policy at Cloudflare, Alissa Starzak, told TechRadar, suggesting we should think of any internet block as censorship.
Why are DNS and VPNs the target of rightsholders?
Short for domain name system, a DNS acts as the internet phone book. It essentially translates users’ requests into strings of numbers – IP addresses – to connect them with the right websites on the web. DNS servers are then essential to navigate the internet, making these services a target of censors and, like in this case, rightholders alike.
A virtual private network (VPN) is then a security software that masks users’ real IP addresses. While this skill is crucial to bypass strict government-imposed internet restrictions, it can also be used as a workaround to current anti-piracy tactics that involve blocking access to piracy sites based on users’ browsing location. This is exactly what some European rightsholders want to prevent.
After a successful legal action against DNS services last year, French streaming giant Canal+ now wants to block VPN usage, too. It has teamed up with France’s professional football league agency, Ligue de Football Professionel (LFP), to issue court orders against the likes of NordVPN, ProtonVPN, CyberGhost, ExpressVPN, and Surfshark.
Italy has also announced plans to upgrade its infamous Piracy Shield system to extend blackout orders against VPNs and public DNS providers. Specifically, rightsholders can demand piracy-related domain names and IP addresses suspected of copyright infringement to be blocked within 30 minutes.
The Italian case shows how this action can lead to dangerous overblocking incidents, Starzak explains.
“They have blocked some of our IP addresses at various times and even Google Docs got blocked [by mistake] at one point,” she said, pointing out the lack of transparency and accountability around these events. “If you agree that a certain piece of content can be targeted and you’re blocking other stuff that’s should be legally problematic.”
The newly launched attack to VPN usage is a further escalation of these “aggressive” anti-piracy measures in Europe, which has opened up even more questions about the legality of these actions.
As Starzak told TechRadar, the French lawsuit isn’t based on numbers and facts, but simply on the idea that people might access pirated content through a VPN.
She said: “You could argue that an internet shutdown would also solve your problem. There wouldn’t be any streaming if you shut down the internet, right? That’s where proportionality comes into play. It’s not that every possible mechanism to prevent something is the right answer.”
What’s next?
While DNS servers are still in open litigation in France, the VPN Trust Initiative (VTI), whose targeted members include NordVPN, ExpressVPN, and Surfshark, confirmed to TorrentFreak the providers are considering leaving the country over the blocking demands.
“We’ve seen this before in markets like India and Pakistan, where regulatory requirements forced some VPN services to withdraw rather than compromise on encryption standards or log-keeping policies,” said VTI Executive Director Christian Dawson. “France’s potential move to force VPN providers to block content could put companies in a similar position.”
The DNS and VPN industries also worry that these legal actions could create a blueprint for more countries to follow suit.
Starzak believes lawmakers and rightholders should find a more balanced approach to tackle online piracy where oversight, consistency, and transparency go hand in hand.
“It doesn’t mean that there may not be a role for network blocking in limited cases, but we have to start putting some controls instead of randomly blocking. We need to understand what’s acceptable and what’s not,” she said. “Once you start marching down the network blocking path, you may forget there’s this whole other path of potential solutions that hasn’t been considered.”
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