- European ISPs urge EU to hold rights holders financially responsible for removing innocent websites
- Aggressive anti-piracy blockade in Italy, Spain and France has caused widespread collateral damage
- EuroISPA warns that extending blocking orders to DNS and VPN providers is technically flawed and legally disproportionate
Aggressive blocking of sites by copyright holders is ruining 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, a group representing more than 3,300 European ISPs, harshly criticized the collateral damage caused by vague anti-piracy campaigns.
Based on research that includes 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 any resulting damages.
For the average user, this increasing internet censorship means legitimate web services, educational sites, and cloud platforms are randomly shut down just to stop illegal sports broadcasts. It’s a forceful approach that now threatens the global infrastructure of the web, including the best VPN services.
TechRadar has contacted EuroISPA for comment on the specific collateral damage of targeting VPNs 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 broad court orders to block piracy sites by blocking at the IP level. But since thousands of legitimate websites often share a single IP address, this method is causing chaos.
The collateral damage is already staggering. In Italy, the The “Piracy Shield” system failed so badly that a mistaken order left Google Drive offline for more than 12 hours in October 2024.
We already reported how La Liga’s war on piracy is revolutionizing 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 sites, affecting a total of more than 500,000 domains.
đź”´ New report: Collateral damage from IP-based blocking during LALIGA football broadcast in Spain: Evidence from OONI Measurements’ latest research report presents data from OONI documenting widespread collateral damage caused by IP blocking in #Spain during… pic.twitter.com/vNirkfEKfZJune 30, 2026
Despite these massive disruptions, copyright holders face no direct liability.
To address this issue, the ISP group argued that rights holders should “take responsibility for collateral damage caused by overly broad 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 spotlight
As traditional ISPs retreat, rights holders are shifting their focus to other Internet infrastructure intermediaries, creating new legal and a dangerous precedent for Internet freedom.
In its communication to the European Commission, EuroISPA declared itself “deeply concerned” by the attitude adopted in some Member States. “In particular, Italy, Spain, France and Austria, where network blocking measures have gone beyond local access providers to target global infrastructure providers with no direct relationship to the infringing content,” the group wrote.
In France, a court backed the Professional Football League (LFP) in January and ordered major VPNs to block illegal football streams for the third time. The first order was issued in May 2025, when providers such as NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark, ProtonVPN, and CyberGhost were forced to block access to 203 domains.
At the same time, the MPA has pushed for VPNs to 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 hyperlocal blocks securely. As EuroISPA noted in its presentation, global DNS resolvers and VPN providers “lack the technical means to enforce geographically restricted blocks and are often not based in or subject to the jurisdiction of the issuing Member State.”
Experts have repeatedly warned that DNS resolvers are not a censorship tool and that blocking the network will never be the solution. While NordVPN won a crucial legal battle in Spain over La Liga piracy fines, the broader industry remains under threat.
Ultimately, EuroISPA maintains that “because the Internet is designed to be global and redundant, domain or IP blocking is inherently incomplete and prone to excessive blocking.”
Forcing rights holders to pay for their mistakes might be the only way to protect the open Internet.
