EU ISPs Push to Make Rightsholders Pay for Piracy-Block Collateral Damage

EuroISPA, the European ISP trade association, has filed fresh comments to the European Commission’s review of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, arguing that anti-piracy site blocking has grown disproportionate and is increasingly catching legitimate services in its net. The group leans on the Commission’s own finding that the 2023 Recommendation on live-event piracy had only ‘limited positive effects,’ using it to argue that the real gap is in how existing law is enforced, not in the statutes themselves. Its central ask: regulators should enforce current rules rather than pile on new blocking obligations.

The filing catalogs the fallout from aggressive IP-level blocking. Italy’s Piracy Shield reportedly swept up more than 7,700 domains and knocked out email between a Portuguese host and its Italian customers for over two weeks, while AGCOM fined Cloudflare €14 million for non-compliance. In Spain, a LaLiga order targeting shared IP addresses cut millions of users off from banking apps, payment platforms, and developer tools. Blocking demands are also spreading beyond ISPs to DNS resolvers and VPN providers—Cisco pulled OpenDNS from France and Belgium—even though those intermediaries have no direct tie to infringing content and limited ability to geo-restrict.

EuroISPA wants rightsholders held financially liable for overblocking, with clear, enforceable compensation mechanisms, and notes this needs no new legislation since the existing IPRED framework already supports it. It also pushes back on rapid-takedown mandates like Italy’s 30-minute window, which it says fall hardest on smaller providers. Whether the Commission adopts any of this remains open, and rightsholders are expected to use the same review to lobby for even broader blocking powers.