European ISPs want piracy rightsholders to pay for the sites they wrongly block
EuroISPA's pitch is blunt: if your blocking order takes down banking apps and a Portuguese host's email for 16 days, you should pay for the damage. In the thread, the timing toward AI-training data didn't go unnoticed.
EuroISPA is asking the EU to make rightsholders financially liable for collateral damage from overbroad site-blocking. Its examples are concrete: Italy's Piracy Shield hit over 7,700 domains and once knocked a Portuguese host's email offline for 16 days; Spain's LaLiga blocks shared IPs so aggressively that banking and developer tools vanish during matches.
One reader's caution cut through the cheering: model-training firms also want a looser grip on content, so a win framed as protecting users could quietly become a fight over who profits.
EuroISPA's demand: skin in the game for the people pressing block
The European ISP association EuroISPA has told the Commission that rightsholders should be held financially accountable for the collateral damage of overbroad blocking, with compensation mechanisms that are "clearly defined and enforceable." Its core complaint is that site-blocking has turned disproportionate, the 2023 EU live-piracy recommendation had only limited effect, and obligations now reach past ISPs to DNS resolvers and VPN providers.
The damage is documented, not hypothetical. In Italy, the Piracy Shield system's IP-level blocks hit more than 7,700 domains, and a Portuguese hosting provider lost email connectivity with its Italian customers for 16 days; AGCOM separately fined Cloudflare €14 million for non-compliance. In Spain, LaLiga's orders against shared IP addresses knocked out banking apps, payment platforms and developer tools for millions during matches. In France and Belgium, Cisco pulled its OpenDNS service after blocking orders, restoring it in Belgium only on appeal. The legal hook EuroISPA leans on is that current law (IPRED, the CDSM Directive) was never meant to license this much collateral.
The thread: the real bill, and who's really behind the timing
For most readers this was overdue common sense: put a cost on the trigger finger. The sharpest reframing argued the visible costs are the wrong ones to count:
"The real damage from over blocking isn't a few customer service calls to the ISP or a couple of lost customers… The real damage is the millions of hours of wasted time of the citizens of the nation." — londons_explore
Readers on the ground in Spain backed the examples with lived detail: one said LaLiga's president has made anything behind Cloudflare unreachable, including Docker images; another described the routine match-day internet disruption as "absolutely insane" for people who pay for service and use it responsibly.
A recurring argument blamed the ISPs for the mess in the first place — they caved instead of stonewalling the way other tech companies do when handed an inconvenient order:
"It's their fault to begin with, they should have not caved to blocking anyone … But hopefully this is the beginning of them growing a backbone." — a reader on ISP compliance tactics
The most unsettling note wasn't celebration. One reader who works on team dynamics flagged the political subtext: this is the right move, but the moment is convenient for someone else.
"Model training companies want easier access to data, and they have a lot of money and are growing their lobbying … The culture of the people should belong to the people. Let's make sure this doesn't just turn into a transfer of which small subset manages to profit from it." — Dylan Fitzgerald, who consults on team introspection
A simpler procedural fix kept surfacing too: treat takedowns like accusations, not verdicts — disputed content stays up until guilt is confirmed, and a false claim carries a fine. The clarifying point under all of it is that the principle being argued isn't piracy at all. It's whether anyone with a copyright claim can disrupt a country's infrastructure and walk away owing nothing.
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