Filing: Google urged the European Commission not to target DNS resolvers, VPNs, or IPs to fight piracy, calling the measures ineffective and easily circumvented
Google has told the European Commission that pirate site blocking causes “significant harm” and should not target DNS resolvers, VPNs or shared IPs.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google’s filing extends a long-running position against broad, infrastructure-level copyright enforcement. Its 2015 opposition to whole-site removal and the 2025 responses of OpenDNS, Cloudflare, and Google to European DNS-blocking orders show the dispute has moved from search and domains toward the network services that resolve or route traffic.
The stakes are immediate for large DNS and connectivity providers: prior coverage shows OpenDNS chose to leave France and Belgium rather than comply with certain DNS-resolution blocking orders. Google is now arguing to the Commission that expanding those obligations to resolvers, VPNs, or shared IP addresses would be both harmful and readily bypassed.
First-order effects
- Google has put a formal objection on the Commission’s record against piracy remedies that impose blocking duties on DNS resolvers, VPNs, or shared-IP infrastructure.
- DNS and VPN operators gain a prominent ally in resisting rules that could require them to filter access or risk collateral blocking of unrelated users and services sharing an IP address.
Second-order effects
- Rights holders and national authorities pressing for site blocking may face greater pressure to justify why infrastructure-level measures are proportionate and effective, rather than merely shifting users to alternative access paths.
- Providers may increasingly weigh compliance costs and legal exposure against limiting service in particular jurisdictions, as OpenDNS’s withdrawal from France and Belgium illustrates.
Third-order effects
- If European anti-piracy policy continues to extend from websites and search results into shared internet infrastructure, access providers could become a central enforcement layer—and a focal point for disputes over overblocking, circumvention, and cross-border service availability.
- The conflict is likely to sharpen the divide between territorial copyright enforcement and globally operated internet services; the eventual policy balance will determine whether infrastructure providers standardize filtering capabilities or resist jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction obligations.
The trend: This is part of a broader shift in online copyright enforcement from targeting infringing destinations toward imposing access-control responsibilities on the intermediaries that connect users to them.