Whether by court order, administrative process, or even on a semi-voluntary basis, on paper there are dozens of countries that now have some kind of mechanism requiring local ISPs to block pirate sites.
Previously, measures were implemented within specific regions by local ISPs. Now, rightsholders are venturing beyond local infrastructure into the wider internet, to compel global DNS resolvers to render sites inaccessible.
Commissioned by Cloudflare and prepared by Analysys Mason, a new report titled The Economic Cost of Network Blocking examines the repercussions of escalating global efforts to restrict access to content online.
A Patchwork of Blocking Measures
The report provides a detailed overview of how blocking is supposed to work and what can go wrong when things break down. Examples include blunders concerning Italy’s Piracy Shield and LaLiga’s campaign that intermittently wiped out thousands of innocent sites because pirate sites shared the same IP addresses at the time. While all of these events have been reported here in detail, the cumulative effect of blocking on the wider internet is of particular interest.
The report notes that the success of the internet has been made possible by technical standards, infrastructure, and practices applied on a global scale, developed without government intervention at the technical level. Now that governments are attempting to exert more control over content accessible within their countries, the use of blocking measures may come at a cost to the internet itself.
“By intervening at the technical layer, governments risk fragmenting the Internet’s technical fabric. Recent examples show a patchwork of approaches to restricting access to illegitimate content, leading to diverging national regulations and increasing technical fragmentation.”
Undermining the Internet Undermines Confidence
The report warns that the most common methods used, IP address and DNS blocking, impact the wider internet and can lead to collateral damage, impacting both legitimate services and their users. Despite having no connection to the illegitimate content being targeted, those affected suffer immediate economic damage, but the long-term effects are potentially even more serious.
A lack of transparency means that when content is rendered unavailable, intentionally or otherwise, users typically receive no explanation, leading to confusion and erosion of trust in online services. Blocking measures such as DNS poisoning, which effectively lie in response to queries about IP addresses, risk damaging trust built up over decades concerning the reliability of the underlying functions of the internet itself.
Due to a “siloed approach” and a patchwork of blocking measures deployed by various countries, the internet’s success – which was built on a consistent global user experience – risks a descent into disruption, inconsistency, and declining confidence.
None of this, the authors suggest, is good for the wider internet; regional complications undermine global collaboration, with negative consequences for security, resilience, even general fault-finding.
Bad for Users, Bad For the Internet, Bad For Business
While rightsholders point out that piracy hurts their bottom lines, the report submits that the chosen remedy has negative effects on businesses that have no connection to the problem or its purported solution.
“Network blocking can also discourage investments and increase compliance costs for businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises – potentially leading to a situation where only large businesses can manage the complexity of varying national regulations,” the report warns.
“Network blocking may also threaten the openness and economies of scale that have allowed businesses to be created, expand, and flourish through a common shared infrastructure. This environment may give way to hard ‘digital borders’ for online services, with limitations to the global collaboration that has underpinned Internet security and resilience, while threatening investment in new services and infrastructure.”
Additional Risk and Costs For Service Providers
In May 2024, when a French court ordered Google, Cloudflare and OpenDNS to block access to pirated content at the behest of Canal+, the immediate fallout made international headlines.
Rather than build the systems necessary to ensure compliance with the legal requirement, Cisco withdrew its OpenDNS service from the entire country. When a court in Belgium issued a similar ruling earlier this year with a €100,000 daily penalty for failure to comply, OpenDNS exited that country too.
“Most global public DNS resolvers provide their services for free. If the only way to offer such a service is to build and maintain complex software to geolocate and apply distinct blocking requirements for a multitude of countries around the world, companies are likely to simply stop offering the public service, to the detriment of Internet users around the world,” the report notes.
“In the short term, these effects mean it can be more desirable to withdraw the service from the jurisdiction requesting the block than to continue to offer it with a specific set of rules.”
For remaining service providers, Cloudflare and Google, compliance through their global resolvers meant the introduction of different processes and procedures in different jurisdictions. And with that, additional compliance costs, for which they pick up the bill. Ultimately, however, these increased costs are often passed on, meaning consumers of legitimate content and services pay for site blocking.
Who Benefits From Site-Blocking?
When sites are blocked on copyright grounds, any benefits are primarily enjoyed by a relatively small number of private stakeholders, the report notes. Service providers, on the other hand, face increased burdens of compliance, extreme financial penalties, a risk of internet fragmentation, and associated complications directly affecting their businesses.
“These risks and harms should be assessed vis-a-vis the benefits that blocking is intending to create (and may or may not be effective in bringing about). Where network blocking is prompted by copyright infringement, the benefits of the blocking action are attributed only to individual copyright holders,” the authors write.
Alluding to blocking orders obtained to protect live broadcasts taking place at a specific time, the report notes that the benefits of blocking “are accrued very narrowly” if the measure is effective “and not at all if avoidance mechanisms can be effectively deployed.”
Given that the premium copyrighted content in question is only consumed legally by the limited audience who choose to pay for it, “the wider public benefits of such actions are very limited,” the report adds.
The report also highlights a lack of recourse when blocking measures go wrong, and a lack of redress due to the absence of a mechanism that would provide compensation for additional costs, loss of trade, or reputational damage.
“Without mechanisms for appeal or accountability for copyright holders, there are few deterrents against procedural abuse. The lack of legal remedies can also discourage foreign investment, as it signals weak regulatory transparency and insufficient due process,” the report adds.
Cost vs. Benefits
In addition to balancing the benefits of blocking against potential risk, the report repeatedly recommends that removing content at the source should always be the primary course of action. That makes complete sense since it would remove any need for blocking and with that eliminate any and all risk.
“Removal of content from the origin server can be achieved by instructing the operator of the origin server or content creator to remove the content. This instruction can be issued directly by the authority seeking to restrict access to the content, or facilitated by another value chain actor, such as the ISP or CDN.”
This overly optimistic solution sounds feasible but appears to be of little interest to increasingly impatient rightsholders, who now want live streams taken down in a matter of minutes. Italy’s Piracy Shield currently blocks servers belonging to Amazon, which should be fairly responsive on the takedown front. The preference for blocking suggests that the takedown ship may have sailed long ago.
Other recommendations include greater transparency, keeping end users better informed, and implementing mechanisms for recourse and redress.
Finally, the authors highlight the UK system for blocking sites as “measured and targeted” and commend it for avoiding overblocking. Those claims do seem accurate, although our observations overall are somewhat more critical.
The UK offers only limited access to court orders in a timely fashion. Many have secret annexes that never see the light of day, and there’s zero transparency after a dynamic or live injunction is obtained, despite that period accounting for the lion’s share of all blocking. ISP messages to users provide only limited information about blocking, and in many cases, no messages at all. Nevertheless, it’s still better than most.
Coincidentally, the top commendation in the report goes to Australia, which we highlighted as a good system just a couple of weeks ago.
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A copy of the report is available on the Analysys Mason website and here (pdf).
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