The European ISP trade body argues that the entity requesting a block — not the ISP forced to execute it within 30 minutes — should pay for damages when blocks sweep up unrelated traffic. They cite Italy's Piracy Shield repeatedly null-routing Cloudflare and Google Cloud IPs, and want a 'you broke it, you bought it' rule rather than a negligence or good-faith standard.
Beyond liability, the position paper demands mandatory human review before dynamic blocks go live, a public registry of all blocked IPs and domains, and a statutory clock for unblocking mistakes. The argument is that real-time industry-operated kill switches lack the due-process guardrails that court-supervised injunctions once provided.
The editorial frames Piracy Shield as a categorical shift from narrowly-scoped court orders against named pirate sites to a real-time pipeline with no pre-publication review. This structural change — not any single overblocking incident — is the actual story, because it transfers a judicial function to private rightsholders operating on a 30-minute clock.
EuroISPA, the trade body that speaks for most of the continent's internet access providers, has filed a position paper with the European Commission arguing that rightsholders who request site-blocking orders should be on the hook for the damages those orders cause when they sweep up legitimate traffic. The document lands as Brussels works through the Digital Fairness Act and a parallel review of how dynamic blocking interacts with the DSA's notice-and-action regime.
The specific complaint is familiar to anyone who has watched Italy's Piracy Shield in action since it went live in early 2024. The system, run by AGCOM and triggered by Serie A and other rightsholders, has repeatedly ordered ISPs to null-route IP addresses belonging to Cloudflare, Google Cloud, and other shared-hosting platforms — taking out thousands of unrelated services as collateral. A widely-cited incident in late 2024 briefly disrupted a hospital booking portal that happened to share an IP range with a flagged streaming source. EuroISPA's pitch is simple: the entity that pulls the trigger should pay for what it hits.
The paper also pushes for mandatory human review before dynamic blocks go live, a public registry of blocked IPs and domains, and a fast-track unblocking mechanism with a statutory clock. None of these are new ideas in isolation. What is new is the explicit demand for strict liability — not a negligence standard, not a good-faith safe harbor, but a 'you broke it, you bought it' rule for overblocking.
The current European blocking regime evolved out of injunctions against named pirate sites — single domains, occasionally a handful of IPs. Piracy Shield generalized that into a real-time pipeline: rightsholders submit hashes or addresses, ISPs are required to act within 30 minutes, and there is essentially no pre-publication review. The shift from court-supervised injunctions to industry-operated kill switches is the actual story, and EuroISPA is the first major industry voice to argue that the cost structure of that shift is wrong.
From a pure incentives standpoint, the EuroISPA position is hard to argue with. Right now the rightsholder bears almost none of the cost of a bad block. The ISP eats the support tickets and the reputational damage when a customer can't reach their bank. The owner of the wrongly-blocked service eats the lost revenue. The rightsholder gets a free option: aggressive blocking with no downside. Strict liability would internalize that externality. It is the same logic that applies to anyone else who pulls a fire alarm — false alarms cost the alarm-puller, not the building.
The counter-argument from MPA-Europe and the Premier League, predictable in advance, will be that strict liability chills legitimate enforcement and that piracy itself imposes uncompensated costs. Both true, both irrelevant to the question of who pays when a hospital goes dark because someone hashed the wrong /24. The choice isn't between blocking and not blocking; it's between rightsholders bearing the cost of their own mistakes or making everyone else subsidize them. Cloudflare's Matthew Prince has been making variations of this argument for two years and getting nowhere because no European trade body had taken up the position. Now one has.
The technical context matters here. Shared IP infrastructure isn't a quirk of cheap hosting — it's how the modern web is built. A single Cloudflare anycast IP fronts millions of origins. A single Google Cloud Load Balancer IP can sit in front of a hospital, a bank, and a streaming pirate simultaneously. Any blocking system that operates at L3 is going to overblock by design; the only question is who absorbs the cost. The EuroISPA paper makes this point obliquely but doesn't quite say it out loud: IP-based blocking in a CDN-saturated internet is fundamentally incompatible with proportionality, and the only honest response is to either move to domain or content-fingerprint blocking, or to price in the collateral damage.
If you run anything behind Cloudflare, Fastly, Vercel, or any of the hyperscaler load balancers and you serve EU users, you already have non-zero exposure to Piracy Shield-style outages. The standard mitigation has been a multi-CDN failover or a dedicated IP add-on, both of which cost real money and neither of which fully solves the problem. A liability regime that puts rightsholders on the hook would, over time, push them toward more surgical blocking methods — DNS-based, SNI-based, or content-fingerprint approaches that don't sweep entire IP ranges.
The near-term move, regardless of how Brussels rules, is to know your blast radius. If a single AGCOM order against your IP range would kill your service, you should have a documented unblock playbook and a CDN account manager on speed-dial — because the current process to get a wrongly-blocked IP unstuck in Italy averages six to twelve hours and has no SLA. Operators should also pay attention to whether their provider offers a dedicated IP option in the affected jurisdictions; the marginal cost is usually $5-20/month per IP and the insurance value just went up.
For anyone building services that touch user-generated content, hosting, or anything adjacent to a takedown vector, the EuroISPA position is also a useful template. The argument generalizes beyond copyright. The same liability asymmetry exists in DMCA-style processes, in app store takedowns, and in payment processor de-risking. Whoever bears the cost of a wrongful action shapes how aggressive the action gets.
The Commission has not committed to anything beyond reviewing the paper, and the political economy in Brussels favors rightsholders by a wide margin — the music and film lobbies have been working this beat for two decades and the ISP lobby has not. But the technical facts have moved against the rightsholders' position: every year that more of the web consolidates behind a smaller number of shared CDN IPs, the collateral damage from IP-based blocking gets worse. EuroISPA has put a price tag on that trajectory. Whether Brussels picks it up or not, the underlying argument — that the entity pulling the trigger should pay for the misses — is now in the regulatory bloodstream, and it won't leave.
Top 10 dev stories every morning at 8am UTC. AI-curated. Retro terminal HTML email.