Nearly 15 years ago, advocates for internet site-blocking suffered a humiliating defeat in the SOPA/PIPA battle, when the entire internet rose up to reject censoring the web. SOPA opponents understood that forcing ISPs to block accused pirate websites would inevitably lead to blocking innocent sites. When constituent calls melted the phone lines on Capitol Hill, Congress stepped back from the brink. Members even seemed chastened, at least for a little while. But as memories of SOPA fade, the content industries are walking Congress back up to the edge of the site blocking cliff. Thankfully, a striking set of new studies has come along just in time to nudge them back to safety.
The new site blocking pitch goes like this: Around the same time the US rejected SOPA, Europe went all-in on site blocking, and the European internet is just fine. It’s not too late: we can still follow the proven-safe European model.
Legislators are eating it up, keynoting panel events consisting entirely of site blocking advocates touting the upsides of imitating our European friends. At a recent House IP Subcommittee hearing, Chairman Darrell Issa and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, members of Congress who led the anti-SOPA crusade back in the day, both announced their intention to re-introduce their own site-blocking bills, and other members sounded amenable to letting the Motion Picture Association decide which parts of the internet should be available to Americans.
But just as it’s starting to look like site blocking might outrun the truth, a series of studies has been published, each from a different source and each focusing on different data, but all concluding that things are not so rosy in the alleged site-blocking Utopias. As it turns out site-blocking is causing significant collateral damage to innocent sites, it isn’t effectively deterring piracy, and it’s unfairly burdening innocent infrastructure companies with the costs of enforcing the content industries’ rights. Let’s take a look at each study.
The Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies’ new report “The Benefits and Costs of Website-blocking Legislation: an Economic, Legal and Policy Assessment,” concludes that website blocking in the EU fails because its technical effects are short-lived, easily circumvented by users, and readily evaded by pirate sites migrating to new infrastructure. The report explains that “Rightsholders tend to be quick to call for blocking solutions, because they bear none of the costs, which fall instead to providers of intermediary services and internet users more broadly.” The reliance on blunt tools like IP and DNS blocking inevitably leads to overblocking that restricts legitimate content and risks violating EU net neutrality rules. Furthermore, the patchwork of 27 different national blocking regimes creates impossible compliance obligations that have driven foundational service providers out of markets like Belgium and France, fundamentally harming the EU single market.
Another scholarly investigation into Italy’s “Piracy Shield” concludes that the law’s ”broad impact on legitimate services and the potential national security risks outweigh its intended benefits.” The researchers found that indiscriminate IP-level blocking severely disrupts hundreds of non-streaming websites, knocking offline legitimate services ranging from local businesses and charities to major infrastructure like Google Drive and Cloudflare. The system also fails to stop the actual pirates, who simply evade enforcement by migrating to unblocked IPv6 addresses or rotating through leased IP space. This cat-and-mouse game leaves innocent new tenants with unusable, polluted IP addresses, proving that site-blocking causes profound collateral damage while failing to effectively address digital piracy.
Finally, the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) report highlights the failure of site-blocking in Spain, proving that blocking just a handful of IP addresses during live LaLiga football matches inadvertently knocks hundreds of thousands of unrelated domains offline. Because the modern internet relies heavily on shared hosting and content delivery networks like Cloudflare, Amazon, and Squarespace, blocking a mere 4 to 20 IP addresses caused simultaneous outages for over 500,000 domains. The casualties of this blunt enforcement included human rights organizations like Amnesty International, environmental groups, news media, and critical government infrastructure. This empirical data confirms that true surgical precision is impossible with IP blocking, as anti-piracy efforts resulted in massive, indiscriminate censorship of legitimate internet services.
Site-blocking advocates were riding high this time last year, spreading what they said was the good news about other countries’ experiences with censoring the internet as a mode of IP enforcement. Since then, some inconvenient truths have come to light, and the rallying cry of SOPA – don’t censor the web – seems to be validated by this new data. Congress should take heed.