- European ISPs are calling on the EU to hold rights holders financially responsible for taking down innocent websites
- Aggressive anti-piracy blocking in Italy, Spain and France has caused extensive security damage
- EuroISPA warns that extension of blocking orders to DNS and VPN providers is technically flawed and legally disproportionate
Aggressive blocking of websites by copyright holders is breaking the Internet, and Europe’s Internet Service Providers (ISPs) want those rights holders to foot the bill.
In a recent submission to the European Commission, EuroISPA, an umbrella group representing over 3,300 European ISPs, strongly criticized the collateral damage caused by imprecise anti-piracy campaigns.
Grounded in research, including a April 2026 study by the Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS), the organization officially demands that copyright holders who cause excessive network disruptions be held accountable and pay for the resulting damages.
For the average user, this growing internet censorship means that legitimate web services, educational websites and cloud platforms are randomly going dark to stop illegal sports streams. It’s a blunt approach that now threatens the global infrastructure of the web, including the best VPN services.
TechRadar has reached out to EuroISPA for comment on the specific vulnerability in targeting VPNs, and we will update this article if we receive a response.
The current situation in Europe
Over the past few years, major copyright holders such as sports leagues have obtained extensive court orders to block piracy websites using IP-level blocking. But because thousands of legitimate websites often share a single IP address, this method wreaks havoc.
The secondary damage is already staggering. In Italy is The “Piracy Shield” system failed so badly that a botched order took Google Drive offline for over 12 hours in October 2024.
We’ve already 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 match broadcasts, the league inadvertently took down human rights platforms, government domains and environmental websites, affecting a total of over 500,000 domains.
đź”´ New Report: Collateral Damage of IP-Based Blocking During LALIGA Football Streaming in Spain: Evidence from OONI Measurement’s latest research report presents OONI data documenting widespread collateral damage caused by IP blocking in #Spain during… pic.twitter.com/vNirkfEKfZ30 June 2026
Despite these massive disruptions, copyright holders face zero direct liability.
To remedy this, the ISP group argued that rights holders should be “held responsible for security damages caused by blanket blocking actions.”
According to EuroISPA, compensation mechanisms should be clearly defined and enforceable to ensure that “the burden of enforcement failures does not fall on innocent intermediaries and their users.”
VPNs and DNS providers in the crosshairs
As traditional ISPs retreat, rights holders are shifting their targets to other Internet infrastructure intermediaries, creating new legal headaches and a dangerous precedent for internet freedom.
In its submission to the European Commission, EuroISPA said it was “deeply concerned” about the approach in certain Member States. “Most notably Italy, Spain, France and Austria, where network-blocking measures have escalated beyond local access providers to target global infrastructure providers unrelated directly to the offending content,” the group wrote.
In France, a court backed the Professional Football League (LFP) in January, ordering top VPNs to block illegal soccer streams for the third time. At the same time, the MPA has pushed for VPNs to also have a role in the anti-piracy line 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 hyperlocal blocks securely. As EuroISPA noted in its submission, “they lack the technical means to use geo-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 argues that “because the Internet is designed to be global and redundant, domain or IP blocking is inherently incomplete and prone to overblocking.”
Forcing rights holders to pay for their mistakes may be the only way to protect the open internet.
