Site-Blocking Legislation Is Back. It’s Still A Terrible Idea.
from the not-this-again dept
More than a decade ago, Congress tried to pass SOPA and PIPA—two sweeping bills that would have allowed the government and copyright holders to quickly shut down entire websites based on allegations of piracy. The backlash was immediate and massive. Internet users, free speech advocates, and tech companies flooded lawmakers with protests, culminating in an “Internet Blackout” on January 18, 2012. Turns out, Americans don’t like government-run internet blacklists. The bills were ultimately shelved.
Thirteen years later, as institutional memory fades and appetite for opposition wanes, members of Congress in both parties are ready to try this again.
The Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA), along with at least one other bill still in draft form, would revive this reckless strategy. These new proposals would let rights holders get federal court orders forcing ISPs and DNS providers to block entire websites based on accusations of infringing copyright. Lawmakers claim they’re targeting “pirate” sites—but what they’re really doing is building an internet kill switch.
These bills are an unequivocal and serious threat to a free and open internet. EFF and our supporters are going to fight back against them.
Site-Blocking Doesn’t Work—And Never Will
Today, many websites are hosted on cloud infrastructure or use shared IP addresses. Blocking one target can mean blocking thousands of unrelated sites. That kind of digital collateral damage has already happened in Austria, Russia, and in the US.
Site-blocking is both dangerously blunt and trivially easy to evade. Determined evaders can create the same content on a new domain within hours. Users who want to see blocked content can fire up a VPN or change a single DNS setting to get back online.
These workarounds aren’t just popular—they’re essential tools in countries that suppress dissent. It’s shocking that Congress is on the verge of forcing Americans to rely on the same workarounds that internet users in authoritarian regimes must rely on just to reach mislabeled content. It will force Americans to rely on riskier, less trustworthy online services.
Site-Blocking Silences Speech Without a Defense
The First Amendment should not take a back seat because giant media companies want the ability to shut down websites faster. But these bills wrongly treat broad takedowns as a routine legal process. Most cases would be decided in ex parte proceedings, with no one there to defend the site being blocked. This is more than a shortcut–it skips due process entirely.
Users affected by a block often have no idea what happened. A blocked site may just look broken, like a glitch or an outage. Law-abiding publishers and users lose access, and diagnosing the problem is difficult. Site-blocking techniques are the bluntest of instruments, and they almost always punish innocent bystanders.
The copyright industries pushing these bills know that site-blocking is not a narrowly tailored fix for a piracy epidemic. The entertainment industry is booming right now, blowing past its pre-COVID projections. Site-blocking legislation is an attempt to build a new American censorship system by letting private actors get dangerous infrastructure-level control over internet access.
EFF and the Public Will Push Back
FADPA is already on the table. More bills are coming. The question is whether lawmakers remember what happened the last time they tried to mess with the foundations of the open web.
If they don’t, they’re going to find out the hard way. Again.
Site-blocking laws are dangerous, unnecessary, and ineffective. Lawmakers need to hear—loud and clear—that Americans don’t support government-mandated internet censorship. Not for copyright enforcement. Not for anything.
Reposted from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.
Filed Under: copyright, fadpa, pipa, piracy, site blocking, sopa
Comments on “Site-Blocking Legislation Is Back. It’s Still A Terrible Idea.”
I wish the EFF and y’all the best of luck. Orgs like them have been the sole pillar of some kind of hope I’ve found against the death of the internet I know and love.
They should have at least had the decency to call it the Foreign Anti-Piracy Digital Act.
Good to hear. But for that pushback to be effective, we need functional courts. And a judicial branch that has teeth.
And a legislative branch that has both spine, and listens to their constituents.
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And politicians that listen instead of..Oh I don’t know, propose and support legislation that would silence free expression and peoples’ legal rights from the digital space entirely? (This goes for both repubs and dems because they’re both guilty.)
Will it even work in the presence of DNSSEC? My major domains all have DNSSEC enabled, so if anyone other than my own DNS provider (who isn’t US-based) tries to generate a response claiming a name in my domain doesn’t exist it’d be flagged as an invalid response by the DNSSEC signature check. That’d direct user complaints to their ISP (who usually handles DNS) who’d then have to explain things.
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Hopefully the ISP DNS hijack page doesn’t obfuscate the cause too much.
So if we defeated SOPA and PIPA over a decade ago, why couldn’t the ruling against such proposed laws be used in this day and age to prevent similar laws from ever being passed again? If they failed once, why isn’t that failure being held against them now? Do we need to keep fighting this every decade?
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There was no ruling, exactly, against SOPA and PIPA. Congress simply stopped the bills from moving forward after overwhelming public opposition.
Why do some of the same legislators who denounced SOPA and PIPA in 2012 now support site-blocking bills? That’s a very good question.
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The legislation failed to get enough votes, from what I last heard. It didn’t get shut down by courts.
Besides, copyright overrides all laws globally, as we’ve seen.
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So we’ll keep fighting it, decade after decade, generation after generation, the way that the Belmonts keep fighting Dracula.
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But not Alucard ’cos he’s on the Belmonts’ side.