Google Tells Brussels That Blocking DNS Resolvers and VPNs to Fight Piracy Does More Harm Than Good

Google has formally told the European Commission that broad measures used across Europe to fight online piracy — blocking DNS resolvers, VPN services, and shared IP addresses — are largely ineffective and cause serious collateral damage to legitimate internet infrastructure.

The comments came in a submission to the Commission's consultation on the review of the Copyright Directive. The filing was originally marked privileged and confidential, but has since become public as part of the Commission's call for evidence. Google is already under court orders in France, Belgium, Italy, and Portugal requiring it to block specific pirate domains through its own public DNS resolver, the widely used 8.8.8.8 service.

Google's core argument is that blocking at the DNS, IP, or VPN level doesn't remove infringing content from the internet at all — it only makes one path to it harder to find, while a determined user can switch to a different DNS resolver or a different route entirely. The company argues this makes the approach disproportionate, since blocking an IP address or a DNS resolver frequently catches large numbers of unrelated, lawful websites and services that happen to share the same address or infrastructure as an actual target.

To support that argument, Google's filing points to several documented overblocking incidents. In Italy, the country's Piracy Shield system mistakenly blocked a Google Drive subdomain, an error that ended up affecting IP addresses tied to more than 42 million Cloudflare customer domains. In France, Cisco discontinued its OpenDNS service entirely after a court ordered DNS resolvers to comply with blocking mandates. In Portugal, local internet providers blocked Google-hosted virtual IP addresses back in December 2019, disrupting core Google services and cutting off legitimate traffic for other Google Cloud customers who happened to share the same infrastructure.

The filing also cites independent research from the Open Observatory of Network Interference, which found that blocking orders tied to live La Liga football broadcasts in Spain affected more than 554,000 domains at least once. Organizations swept up in those blocks reportedly included UNICEF, UNHCR, Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Australian Senate, and Amazon's S3 cloud storage infrastructure — none of which had any connection to the football streams the blocks were meant to target.

Rather than rejecting site blocking outright, Google's position is that it should only be used as a last resort, paired with stronger safeguards against exactly this kind of collateral damage.

The timing of the submission is notable. It landed just days after a hearing held by the U.S. House Intellectual Property Subcommittee on copyright enforcement online, at a moment when American lawmakers appear to be moving closer to introducing their own site-blocking legislation, with early drafts reportedly including DNS-level blocking provisions. Google hasn't publicly commented on the U.S. proposals specifically, though industry groups it belongs to — including the Software and Information Industry Association and the Internet Infrastructure Coalition — have raised similar concerns during congressional hearings, pushing for strong judicial oversight and more technically precise measures that avoid damaging shared internet infrastructure.