ISP Site-Blocking is Not the Way to Combat Online Piracy

Battles over federal taxation and spending policy took up much of the floor time in Congress in 2025. But several tech-related legislative proposals have flown under the radar this year, including a renewed push to force internet service providers (ISPs) to take down foreign websites or even entire IP addresses that are found to host copyright-infringing streaming services. While aimed at curbing the piracy of paid online streaming content, such site-blocking proposals will most likely result in overenforcement that would affect both lawful and unlawful content, would give far too much government control over the flow of information online.

The concept of forcing ISPs to enforce copyright violations via site blocking is hardly new. Many readers may remember the controversy over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) over a decade ago. These broad site-blocking mandates posed such an acute threat to online free speech that tens of thousands of websites banded together to stage an internet blackout in protest. The overwhelming backlash against SOPA and PIPA caused ISP site-blocking legislation to go dormant for many years in the U.S.

Two such bills have been proposed in 2025: the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA), offered by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), and the creatively titled Block Bad Electronic Art and Recording Distributors (BlockBEARD) Act, which has been drafted by Senator Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and several colleagues but has not yet been formally introduced. To their credit, both of these bills are far narrower in scope than SOPA and PIPA, and primarily target foreign-operated piracy operations. They would each operate by creating a mechanism for copyright holders to obtain federal court orders that ISPs must take down foreign sites or IP addresses that host services that “are primarily designed or provided for” the infringement of copyrighted content or services.  

However thoughtfully constructed, there are significant fundamental problems with ISP-level site-blocking that remain unaddressed. For example, both bills, as currently proposed, would potentially require an ISP to take down entire IP addresses that host offending content, when a single IP address might host many non-offending sites. When a copyright holder raises a complaint in court, a judge gets the final say on the scope and duration of the takedown order, with little due process available in the short term to any non-offending sites that get taken down as collateral damage. The deployment of an ISP site-blocking mandate in Italy has proven illustrative, with a recent study finding dozens of cases of non-infringing websites being blocked. And over-blocking is already a well-established problem in attempts to combat piracy on U.S.-based sites under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Both FADPA and BlockBEARD attempt to mitigate these problems by constraining the duration and breadth of the blocking orders that judges can issue, but both practical and due process issues ensure that some overblocking will result. First, the proceedings will in most cases be ex parte, with only the copyright holders presenting the evidence for a judge’s consideration. Because pirate streaming can easily be moved from one site or IP address to another, judges are given the flexibility to quickly approve follow-on takedown orders (often referred to as “dynamic blocking”), but this can simply result in a game of site-blocking “whack-a-mole.”

Aside from these drawbacks, a 2025 Internet Infrastructure Coalition study explained that governments using ISPs as enforcers to block illegal content at the site and IP-level create inherent technical problems with implications for the global stability of the internet. As the report details, the more that governments get used to employing infrastructure-level mandates for even narrowly targeted policies such as IP protection, the more it creates opportunities for internet censorship, surveillance, and fragmentation.

As the Internet Society explains, the better—and, in the long run, more effective—way to stop online streaming pirates is to go through the legal process of identifying and targeting pirates at their source. This requires a multi-stakeholder approach that uses site-blocking only as a method of last resort, with greater protections than those offered by weaponizing ISPs as tools for enforcement. The site-blocking approach to copyright enforcement is simply too lacking in due process and is too easily manipulated by bad actors to be consistent with maintaining a free and open internet.