A French court has ordered internet intermediaries such as Google and Cloudflare actively block access to prominent and illegal piracy sites at the request of sports rights holders. But Google is pushing back against this judgment, and its reasoning is surprisingly sound.
The landmark ruling places direct liability on upstream Internet providers rather than on illegal streaming services, which are notoriously difficult to enforce in local court, especially if exploit loopholes in international law or use backup domains and servers who go online when their main platforms are blocked.
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In order to effectively block access to these sites, which operate on multiple domains, servers, and web addresses, Google will have to use a combination of DNS filtering and IP- and VPN-blocking, but these catch-all methods guaranteed impacting law-abiding users and web hosts as well. Analogously, it’s like trying to catch a minnow with a large trawl net. At the end of the day, you may have all the minnows in the ocean, but you will also harm dolphins, whales, and other types of fish.
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Worse, savvy cybercriminals have many ways to circumvent these actions, meaning minnows can still get away while the big fish (normal internet users) get caught in the filter.
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Google means a lot their submission to the EU court:
“Blocking DNS resolvers, IPs, VPNs, is not effective, as it does not remove content at all and is easily avoided by using other DNS resolvers. It is not equal, it holds legitimate services, raises the concern of additional area and blocks all domains. Similarly, blocking IP addresses does not remove content or to achieve many services associated with IP may comply with the same law.”
The Google report goes on to cite the real-world damage caused by this blanket ban, including unintentionally blocking Google Drive and restricting access to websites such as Amnesty International, ACLU, UNICEF, UNHCR, the Australian Senate, and the Stanford Law Review.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation echoed Google’s criticism, saying EU efforts to regulate the Internet “keep EU users locked behind big tech gates.” The EFF also took a a strong stand against the automatic filtering authority argued for in Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive.
It seems that this concern is coming to the United States, as House IP Subcommittee they met on June 30 to discuss directly the type of ban on high content being enforced by the EU. California Representative Darrell Issa already has he promised to introduce such a bill.
Not coincidentally, these enforcement efforts are increasing as illegal streaming and downloading become more popular (a “The Piracy Renaissance,” according to another book), probably not despite that of a huge spike in online streaming platforms but because of these platforms and their ongoing efforts to raise the prices, introducing advertising, again separate their contents.
Expect this debate to intensify as technology companies are increasingly drawn into the dispute, and as the interests of internet giants like Google clash with the copyright claims of major media broadcasters.