Football fans who relied on pirate sites to follow Belgian league matches were in for a nasty surprise last Saturday. Several illegal streaming platforms simply disappeared from the radar, and it wasn't a bug. According to the daily newspaper L'Echo, DAZN and 12th Player, which broadcasts the competition in Belgium, launched a major crackdown on more than 130 illegal streaming and IPTV sites.
A well-planned raid before the playoffs
The objective was clear: to break the habits of spectators who turn to these alternative, often free, services to watch the matches. The timing was anything but random. The blocks came into effect just before the start of the second day of the playoffs. This frustrated many fans and sent a message.
What makes the operation particularly forceful is that it didn't stop at internet service providers. DAZN and 12th Player also obtained an order from the Brussels Business Court for Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco – which offer public DNS services – to also block the listed sites. And if these companies don't comply? The fine rises to 100,000 euros... per day.
In Belgium, blocking pirate sites is nothing new. The Pirate Bay was already in the crosshairs as early as 2011. But until then, these actions were often one-off, sometimes ineffective, and rarely massive. Everything changed with a law passed in 2022, which gives rights holders more legal means to react quickly and block sites dynamically—that is, without having to go back to court every time a domain is changed.
In 2024, DAZN and 12th Player had already begun to use these new tools, with the support of the country's main ISPs: Telenet, Proximus, Voo, and Orange. The latter have not held back. On the contrary, their leaders have publicly supported these measures.
The new thing here is the direct involvement of DNS services. Previously, when a site was blocked by an ISP, it was often enough to change the DNS (to go through Google or Cloudflare) to access it again. This time, even this plan B didn't work. It remains to be seen whether this strategy will last over time. Because blocking access is not the same as eliminating illegal traffic. the source.
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