By Brandon Butler

Congress is currently considering several bills that would let U.S. copyright owners seek court orders compelling internet utilities to block alleged foreign pirate websites. Combating piracy is a valid goal, but the mechanism that bills like the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA) rely on—mandating that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and DNS resolvers block access to specific IP addresses and domains—is fundamentally broken. FADPA could be the end of the internet as we know it.

Members of Re:Create, the coalition I lead, comprised of non-profits ranging from library groups to start-ups, cyber civil liberties champions, and open internet pioneers, have warned for years that these bills would break the internet by mucking around in the domain name system.

FADPA was introduced by Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) in January and is currently sitting with the House Judiciary Committee. While it has received no cosponsors in Congress, it has garnered outside support from organizations like the Motion Picture Association (MPA), which downplays its negative impacts. In recent years, their lead talking point has been that European site-blocking laws are working great, and America should follow suit. They use wildly inflated numbers to overstate the economic impact of online piracy, eliding their own role in driving consumers away with legal options that are fragmented and costly.

Most importantly, site-blocking advocates turn a blind eye to the issues we see abroad. To the entertainment industry, the collateral damage to the open web is a perfectly acceptable price to pay to protect their bottom line. Data from several recent studies suggest the MPA is like the cartoon dog in a room on fire, thinking “this is fine” while hundreds of thousands of legitimate websites, including those for hospitals, nunneries, and human rights organizations, get burned. The U.S. cannot afford to import this technically disastrous policy.

There’s a technical reason these laws fail. The internet does not work like a physical address system in a small town, where one address represents one building that houses one business. Today’s internet relies heavily on shared infrastructure like Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and cloud hosting, something more like a metropolitan area full of high-rises and dotted with co-working space. Businesses can change addresses easily, and thousands can share a single address. FADPA requires judges to ensure that blocking orders will not “interfere with user access to non-infringing material,” but cybersecurity experts and the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) have explained that “targeted” blocking is practically impossible. Because companies like Cloudflare and Squarespace act as reverse proxies, a single IP address can serve thousands or even millions of completely unrelated, legitimate domains. When a judge orders a block on that IP address, everything goes dark.

We can see this collateral damage in Spain. During LaLiga soccer matches, ISPs were ordered to block specific IP addresses linked to unauthorized streams. A comprehensive study by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) revealed that blocking fewer than 20 IP addresses in a one-hour window inadvertently knocked offline more than 500,000 unique, legitimate domains. These weren’t just personal blogs. The blocked sites included small businesses from around Europe as well as Amnesty International, Greenpeace, the Ukrainian Crisis Media Center, and the Bergamo Court in Italy. Under FADPA, American non-profits, small businesses, and government agencies would face these same sudden, inexplicable outages.

FADPA includes provisions for expedited blocking orders to stop the imminent transmission of live events. Italy recently implemented a similar system called “Piracy Shield” for live sports, which forces ISPs to block notified IP addresses within 30 minutes, without prior judicial assessment. In February 2024, Piracy Shield mistakenly blocked a Cloudflare IP, taking down over 40,000 websites. In October 2024, it blocked a critical subdomain of Google Drive, cutting off Italian users from their stored files for hours. Haste in site-blocking guarantees catastrophic errors.

While it inevitably causes massive collateral damage, site-blocking fails to actually stop piracy. Studies show that pirates easily evade blocks by migrating to new infrastructure or utilizing IPv6, while users simply switch to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or encrypted DNS resolvers. Meanwhile, the burden of these blocks falls entirely on neutral service providers. In France and Belgium, overly broad blocking orders prompted major DNS providers, like Cisco’s OpenDNS, to simply withdraw their services from those countries entirely rather than face impossible compliance demands and legal risks. Passing FADPA risks driving open internet infrastructure out of the U.S. market or severely degrading it.

An extensive economic study by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) found that the most effective way to combat piracy isn’t dismantling the internet’s architecture; it’s increasing the availability and convenience of legal content and reducing fragmented subscription costs. The entertainment industry would rather upend the internet than fix their own broken business.

FADPA is a well-intentioned bill built on a foundation of technical ignorance and willful blindness to the realities of Europe’s experience. U.S. lawmakers could learn from the Austrian telecom regulator TKK, which recently investigated IP-level blocking and concluded it is inherently disproportionate and violates net neutrality because of unavoidable overblocking. Congress should heed the warnings of Europe’s failed experiments, protect the integrity of the global internet, and reject FADPA and other site-blocking bills.

Brandon Butler is the Executive Director of Re:Create, a balanced copyright coalition.