Increasingly, countries, especially in Europe, have enforced strict measures recently to stop the spread of pirated content. Still, Cloudflare, a leading DNS server provider, Techradar, told “Network blocking will never be the solution.”
DNS providers were the first to be targeted at blocking orders and litigation from French, Spanish and Italian authorities. However, these authorities have now begun to target some of the best VPN services on similar reasons. However, technologists have long warned that these tactics lead to disproportionate overpowering events while undermining people’s internet freedom.
“The kind of network -blocking effort is to have security effects and destroy the Internet,” Vice President and Global Leader of Public Policy in Cloudflare, Alissa Starzak, told Techradar, suggesting we should think of any internet block as censorship.
Why are DNS and the VPNs target for the legal gardens?
Short for Domain Name System, A DNS acts as the Internet phone book. It essentially translates users’ requests to strings of numbers – IP addresses – to connect them with the right sites on the web. DNS servers are then important for navigating the Internet, making these services a measure of censoring and, as in this case, both shelfs.
A virtual private network (VPN) is then a security software that masks users’ real IP addresses. Although this skill is crucial to bypassing strict state imposed internet restrictions, it can also be used as a solution to the current anti-piracy tactics involving blocking access to piracy sites based on users’ browsing placement. This is exactly what some European legal gardens will prevent.
After a successful lawsuit against DNS services last year, the French streaming Giant Canal+ now also wants to block VPN use. It has joined forces with France’s professional football league -agent, Ligue de Football Professional (LFP), to issue court decisions against NordVPN, Protonvpn, Cyberghost, ExpressVPN and Surfshark.
Italy has also announced plans to upgrade its notorious piracy system to expand blackout orders against VPNs and public DNS providers. Specifically, right-wing holders may require piracy-related domain names and IP addresses suspected of copyright infringement must be blocked within 30 minutes.
The Italian case shows how this action can lead to dangerous overpowering events, Starzak explains.
“They’ve blocked some of our IP addresses at different times, and even Google Docs were blocked [by mistake] At one point, “she said, pointing out the lack of transparency and accountability about these events.” If you agree that a particular piece of content can be targeted and you block other things that need to be legally problematic. “
The newly launched attack on VPN use is a further escalation of these “aggressive” anti-piracy measures in Europe, which have opened even more questions about the legality of these actions.
As Starzak told Techradar, the French trial is not based on numbers and facts, but merely on the idea that people can access pirated content through a VPN.
She said, “You could argue that an internet closure would also solve your problem. There would be no streaming if you close the internet, not? This is where the proportionality comes into play. It’s not that any possible mechanism to prevent something is the right answer.”
What is the 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, providers are considering leaving the country during the blocking requirements.
“We’ve seen this before in markets like India and Pakistan, where legislative demands forced some VPN services to retire instead of compromising encryption standards or log-holding policies,” said VTI CEO Christian Dawson. “France’s potential steps 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 can create a plan for more countries to follow.
Starzak believes that legislators and rather should find a more balanced approach to tackling online piracy, where supervision, consistency and transparency go hand in hand.
“It does not mean that there may not be a role in networking blocking in limited cases, but we have to start putting some controls instead of randomly blocking. We have to understand what is acceptable and what is not,” she said. “When you start marjing down the network blocking path, you may forget that there is all this other way to potential solutions that have not been considered.”
