Google Opposes Site Blocking in Europe as U.S. Piracy Blocking Plans Gain Momentum * TorrentFreak

Google Opposes Site Blocking in Europe as U.S. Piracy Blocking Plans Gain Momentum

Google rarely addresses pirate site blocking in public, but it is a significant concern now that these measures directly impact the company’s own infrastructure.

The American tech company has been ordered to block access to pirate domain names through its DNS resolver in France, Belgium, Italy and Portugal, for example.

In a recent submission to the European Commission’s call for evidence on the review of the Copyright Directive, Google lists its site blocking critique in detail. The filing is marked "Privileged and Confidential" but it was posted publicly on the commission’s website, alongside other submissions.

Blocking Harms Outweigh Benefits, Google Argues

Google’s submission addresses a variety of topics, including the company’s opposition to broad site blocking measures. This includes VPN and third-party DNS blocking, which is seen as disproportionate and ineffective. The same applies to IP-address blocking, which risks targeting infrastructure of legitimate sites and services.

"Blocking DNS resolvers, IPs, VPNs, is ineffective, as it does not remove content at all and is easily circumvented by using alternative DNS resolvers. It is disproportionate, catching lawful services, raising extra-territoriality concerns and blocking entire domains," Google writes.

"Similarly, blocking IP addresses neither removes the content nor achieves proportionate outcomes, as many lawful services may be using the same IP address," the company adds.

From Google’s EU Submission

The submission cited several real-world examples to support these claims. It mentions that Italy’s Piracy Shield blocked a Google Drive subdomain, as well as IP-addresses hosting over 42 million domains of Cloudflare customers. Meanwhile, in France, CISCO stopped offering its OpenDNS service after a local court ordered DNS resolver blockades.

Google also highlights a December 2019 incident in Portugal where ISPs blocked Google-hosted Virtual IP addresses, disrupting "core Google services and cut off legitimate traffic for other innocent Google Cloud customers sharing the same virtual IPs."

These concerns are not incidental. A large-scale empirical study published by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) recently found that following a LaLiga blocking order in Spain, more than 554,000 domains were blocked at least once during football match broadcasts. This included website from Amnesty International and the ACLU, UNICEF, UNHCR, the Australian Senate, Stanford Law Review, and Amazon S3 endpoints.

Clear Guardrails

In addition to the overblocking concerns, the submission notes that any expansions of the blocking regime in Europe should be proportional and keep the safeguards in mind that are already provided by EU law. Google specifically notes that courts "should not serve as mere rightholder ‘mail boxes’, by simply rubber-stamping blocking demands."

Google believes that blocking injunction should only be used as a last resort if regular takedown options failed. These injunctions should be transparent, limited in time, while both rightsholders and the intermediaries share the implementation costs.

The submission shows that Google is not outright opposed to site blocking, as long as it’s restricted to targeted and proportional measures. The real solution to piracy does not lie in enforcement, Google argues, but in creating superior legal alternatives.

"In our experience, unmet consumer demand is a key driver of piracy. That is why one of the best ways to combat piracy is to provide better, more convenient, and legitimate alternatives," Google writes.

U.S. Site Blocking Gains Momentum

Google’s EU filing was submitted a few days before U.S. lawmakers doubled down on their site blocking intentions. On June 30, the House IP subcommittee held a hearing on copyright protection and enforcement on the Internet, with planned site blocking legislation as a key topic.

Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa told The Capitol Forum that he planned to introduce a site blocking bill that week. While there is no record of an introduced bill, it suggests that momentum is building.

This was also confirmed during the hearing, as Issa closed by signaling that the educational phase of the lawmaking process is over.

"Language is being distributed on what we’ll believe is final compromises to get to legislation," he said. "It’s going to be my intention, with the help of my chairman and old friend, Mr. Jordan, that we will move it out of this committee."

IP Subcommittee Chairman Issa

Rep. Issa is retiring at the end of his current term. Whether the bill has been formally introduced since his stated deadline is not clear. TorrentFreak has reached out to Issa’s office for comment, but we didn’t hear back.

Issa’s bill isn’t the only proposal. Rep. Zoe Lofgren,...