European ISPs demand rightsholders pay for collateral damage from piracy blocking

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European ISPs urge the EU to hold rightsholders financially liable for taking down innocent websites

Aggressive anti-piracy blocking in Italy, Spain, France has caused widespread collateral damage

EuroISPA warns that extending blocking orders to DNS and VPN providers is technically flawed and legally disproportionate

Aggressive site blocking by copyright holders is breaking the internet, and Europe's internet service providers (ISPs) want those rightsholders to foot the bill.

In a recent submission to the European Commission, EuroISPA, an umbrella group representing over 3,300 European ISPs, has strongly criticized the collateral damage caused by imprecise anti-piracy campaigns.

Grounded in research including an April 2026 study by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), the organization is officially demanding that copyright holders who cause excessive network outages be held accountable and pay for the resulting damages.

For the average user, this growing internet censorship means legitimate web services, educational sites, and cloud platforms are randomly going dark just to stop illegal sports streams. It's a blunt approach that is now threatening the global infrastructure of the web, including the best VPN services.

TechRadar has contacted EuroISPA for a 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

Over the last few years, major copyright holders like sports leagues have obtained sweeping court orders to block piracy sites using IP-level blocking. But because thousands of legitimate websites often share a single IP address, this method is causing chaos.

The collateral damage is already staggering. In Italy, the "Piracy Shield" system misfired so badly that an erroneous order took Google Drive offline for over 12 hours in October 2024.

We already reported how La Liga’s war on piracy is breaking the internet in Spain . Now, a June 2026 report by 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, impacting a total of over 500,000 domains.

🔴 New report: Collateral Damage of IP-Based Blocking During LALIGA Football Streaming in Spain: Evidence from OONI Measurementshttps://t.co/ybJ1BBpXlwOur latest research report presents OONI data documenting widespread collateral damage caused by IP blocking in #Spain during… pic.twitter.com/vNirkfEKfZ June 30, 2026

Despite these massive disruptions, copyright holders face zero direct liability.

To fix this, the ISP group argued that rightsholders should be "held accountable for collateral damage caused by overbroad blocking actions."

According to EuroISPA, compensation mechanisms should be clearly defined and enforceable to ensure that "the burden of enforcement errors does not fall on innocent intermediaries and their users."

VPNs and DNS providers in the crosshairs

(Image credit: Getty Images) As traditional ISPs push back, rightsholders are shifting their aim 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 to be "deeply concerned" by the approach taken 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 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 top VPNs to block illegal football streams for the third time. The first order was issued in May 2025, when providers including NordVPN , ExpressVPN , Surfshark , ProtonVPN , and CyberGhost were forced to block access to 203 domains.

At the same time, the MPA has pressed for VPNs to have a role in the anti-piracy row in Europe as well. 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 hyper-local blocks safely. As EuroISPA noted in its submission, global DNS resolvers and VPN providers "lack the technical means to apply geographically restricted blocks and are frequently neither based in nor subject to the jurisdiction of the issuing Member State."

Experts have repeatedly warned that DNS resolvers aren't a censorship tool , and that network blocking is never going to be the solution . While NordVPN won a crucial legal battle in Spain over La Liga piracy fines , the wider industry remains under threat.

Ultimately, EuroISPA argues that "because the Internet is designed to be global and redundant, domain or IP blocking is inherently incomplete and prone to over-blocking."

Forcing rightsholders to pay for their mistakes might be the only way to protect the open internet.