New measure passed by EU Parliament would let consumer protection authorities order any third party to block access to websites without judicial authorization
Today, the European Parliament passed the Consumer Protection Cooperation regulation. Unfortunately, it contains an overreaching general website blocking provision.
Context & Ripple Effects
With the Consumer Protection Cooperation regulation, the EU Parliament hands national consumer authorities a power usually reserved for courts: ordering any third party to block access to a website, no judicial authorization required. It is an early entry in a pattern the Parliament has repeated since — expanding administrative enforcement over the internet's plumbing before building in procedural safeguards.
The template recurs across the Parliament's later docket: the copyright law with Articles 11 and 13 pushed filtering obligations onto platforms, the Digital Services Act layered platform-governance duties on top, and the CSAM scanning law extended monitoring powers further still. Each move normalizes the one after it.
First-order effects
- National consumer protection authorities gain the immediate ability to issue blocking orders against any third party — registrars, hosts, payment processors — without going to a judge, shifting the burden of contesting a block onto the blocked site itself.
Second-order effects
- Intermediaries become de facto enforcers of consumer law: once any authority can order them to cut off access at low cost, they face pressure to comply broadly rather than litigate each order, and the same mechanism becomes available as a model for other EU regulatory domains.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, EU internet governance consolidates around administrative enforcement at the distribution layer — blocking and filtering orders issued by agencies rather than courts — with judicial review arriving only after access is already cut, a structure later laws on copyright filtering, platform duties, and CSAM scanning have each reinforced.
The trend: The EU Parliament is steadily replacing court-supervised takedowns with direct administrative blocking powers, making intermediaries the default enforcement point for European internet rules.