- European ISPs urge EU to hold rights holders financially responsible for shutting down innocent websites
- Aggressive anti-piracy blocking in Italy, Spain and France has caused significant collateral damage
- EuroISPA warns that extending blocking orders to DNS and VPN providers is technically wrong and legally disproportionate
Aggressive blocking of sites by copyright holders is destroying the Internet, and Europe’s Internet Service Providers (ISPs) want these rights holders to foot the bill.
In a recent submission to the European Commission, EuroISPA, a group that represents more than 3,300 European ISPs, sharply criticized the collateral damage caused by inaccurate anti-piracy campaigns.
Research-based, including a According to an April 2026 study by the Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS), the organization officially demands that copyright holders who cause excessive network outages be held accountable and pay for resulting damages.
For the average user, this growing internet censorship means that legitimate web services, educational sites, and cloud platforms are randomly shutting down, just to stop illegal sports streams. It’s a heavy-handed approach that now threatens the world’s web infrastructure, including top VPN services.
TechRadar has contacted EuroISPA for comment on specific collateral damage related to VPN targeting, and we will update this article if we receive a response.
The current situation in Europe
In recent years, major copyright holders, such as sports leagues, have obtained sweeping court orders to block piracy sites using IP-level blocking. But since thousands of legitimate websites often share a single IP address, this method wreaks havoc.
The collateral damage is already enormous. In Italy, the The “Piracy Shield” system failed so badly that an erroneous command took Google Drive offline for more than 12 hours in October 2024.
We’ve previously reported how La Liga’s war on piracy is breaking the internet in Spain. Now, a June 2026 report from the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) revealed that by blocking just a handful of shared IP addresses during game broadcasts, the league inadvertently took down human rights platforms, government domains, and environmental sites, impacting a total of more than 500,000 domains.
đź”´ New report: Collateral damage from IP-based blocking during LALIGA soccer streaming in Spain: Evidence from OONI Measurements’ latest research report presents OONI data documenting widespread collateral damage caused by IP blocking in #Spain during… pic.twitter.com/vNirkfEKfZJune 30, 2026
Despite these massive disruptions, copyright owners face no direct liability.
To address this issue, the FAI Group argued that rights holders should be “held responsible for collateral damage caused by overbroad blocking actions.”
According to EuroISPA, compensation mechanisms should be clearly defined and enforceable to ensure that “the burden of application errors does not fall on innocent intermediaries and their users”.
VPN and DNS providers in the crosshairs
As traditional ISPs respond, rights holders are turning to other Internet infrastructure intermediaries, creating new legal and a dangerous precedent for Internet freedom.
In its communication to the European Commission, EuroISPA said it was “deeply concerned” by the approach taken by some member states. “Particularly in Italy, Spain, France and Austria, where network blocking measures have expanded beyond local ISPs to target global infrastructure providers with no direct relationship to illicit content,” the group wrote.
In France, a court backed the Professional Football League (LFP) in January and ordered top VPNs to block illegal soccer streams for the third time. At the same time, the MPA insisted that VPNs also play a role in the fight against piracy in Europe. And Italy also plans to require VPN and DNS providers to block pirated content..
However, VPNs and DNS resolvers lack the technical architecture to implement these hyper-local blocks securely. As EuroISPA noted in its communication, they “do not have the technical means to apply geographically restricted blocks and are often neither based in nor subject to the jurisdiction of the issuing Member State.”
Experts have repeatedly warned that DNS resolvers are not a censorship tool and that network blocking will never be the solution.
Ultimately, EuroISPA asserts that “because the Internet is designed to be global and redundant, domain or IP blocking is inherently incomplete and subject to excessive blocking.”
Forcing rights holders to pay for their mistakes may be the only way to protect the open Internet.
