ISPs Say Rights Holders Must be Held Accountable for Blocking Innocent Websites

The EuroISPA (European ISP Association), which represents over 3,300 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) across the EU and EFTA countries (including the United Kingdom), has called for copyright holders to be “held accountable” when their measures to stop access to online piracy (copyright infringement) creates “collateral damage [due to] overbroad blocking actions“.

Broadband ISPs subject to network-level blocking orders, which in the UK usually flow from Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA), have over the past 16 years become very common. Hundreds of sites have been blocked through this approach (thousands if you include their proxies and mirrors), which usually include file sharing (P2P / Torrent), streaming sites, Sci-Hub and those that sell counterfeit goods etc.

However, the EuroISPA say they fully support an “effective, fair, and future-proof copyright framework” and the “protection of intellectual property rights“. The issue they have is that the sledgehammer approach to blocking piracy sites and services, which is often at least partly automated, often ends up restricting access to legitimate sites and services too. Getting such issues resolved can also be a slow and difficult process.

For example, websites that foster copyright infringement will often do so via shared IP (Internet Protocol) addresses and servers, which will also connect to many completely unrelated and legitimate sites and services that innocent users harness. Suffice to say that a blanked restriction against the same IP address will often end up catching out those legitimate services too.

The EuroISPA highlights various practical examples of this across several countries, such as in Spain: “Every weekend for the past year and a half, millions of Spanish internet users have lost access to banking apps, developer tools, and other platforms with no per-block judicial review and no mechanism for redress. Collateral damage has included Google Fonts, institutional sites, and payment platforms — all mistakenly blocked.”

The association further highlights a rise in the number of cases where network blocking measures have escalated “beyond local access providers to target global infrastructure providers with no direct relationship to the infringing content. These approaches are neither effective nor proportionate, and risk causing significant collateral damage to lawful users and services“.

In response the organisation has called for policymakers to review the effectiveness of existing measures and update their laws, such as to require that a prior assessment take place before blocking (i.e. to try and limit accidental overblocking) – with sufficient time being allowed for this – and to hold Rights Holders “accountable … for collateral damage caused by overbroad blocking actions“.

The latter idea above goes on to propose compensation mechanisms that must be clearly defined and enforceable, so as to reduce lazy blocking that risks doing more harm than good. The goal is to ensure that the burden of enforcement errors does not fall on innocent intermediaries (e.g. web hosting services, DNS resolvers, VPN providers etc.) and their users.

EuroISPA Statement

EuroISPA believes that it is essential that policymakers understand the structural limitations of network-level blocking as an enforcement tool. ISPs providing access infrastructure are the furthest from the point of infringement. They can only respond to orders by blocking domain names or IP addresses; they cannot remove individual pieces of infringing content, which can only be accomplished at the hosting level through notice-and-takedown procedures.

Because the Internet is designed to be global and redundant, domain or IP blocking is inherently incomplete and prone to over-blocking. This structural reality is confirmed by independent analysis: an April 2026 study by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) concludes that IP-based blocking is structurally overinclusive, that rightsholders bear none of the implementation costs and therefore have no incentive to avoid collateral damage, and recommends that IP-address blocking be avoided altogether in favour of DNS- or URL-level mechanisms where blocking is used at all.

The issue itself is not a new one and has been raised again now because the European Commission (EC) is currently reviewing the copyright provisions of their Digital Single Market Directive (CDSM Directive, EU 2019/790). But it should be noted that the focus above is on IP-level restrictions, while DNS and URL-level mechanisms get more of a pass.

We recommend reading the EuroISPA’s full submission in order to get all the detail and it’s a fairly smooth 10 page read.

EuroISPA Document on Overblocking
https://www.euroispa.org/../EuroISPA-Contribution-to-the-Targeted-Initiative-in-Copyright-2026.pdf