As pirate sites evade the traditional blocks put in place by access providers, rights holders are turning to another building block of the Internet: public DNS resolvers, services offered by Google (8.8.8.8), Cloudflare (1.1.1.1), and OpenDNS, a Cisco subsidiary. For the past year, court decisions have been piling up in Europe—particularly in France, Belgium, and Italy—to force these companies to block access to certain domains linked to illegal streaming or downloading.
Three giants, three radically different approaches
But tampering with the DNS isn't a minor technical adjustment. It's attacking a pillar of the Internet, the one that translates each domain name into an IP address. And depending on how this intervention is implemented, it can go completely unnoticed by the user... or, on the contrary, arouse suspicion. Who blocked this site? Is it an outage? Censorship? A browser bug? Lack of transparency often leaves Internet users in the dark.
Faced with court orders, OpenDNS has taken a radical decision: to leave the affected countries. In both France and Belgium, the company has suspended access to its service, effectively preventing all residents from using it, regardless of whether they were visiting targeted sites or not. This method has the merit of clarity... but penalizes all users without distinction.
Cloudflare, on the other hand, has opted for a more granular solution. When an Internet user attempts to access a blocked site from a affected country, an HTTP 451 error message is displayed, indicating that the content is restricted for legal reasons. The explanation is clear, documented, and even links to the Lumen database, which lists requests for removal or blocking of content worldwide.
At Google, it's radio silence. The DNS resolver simply rejects queries related to banned domains. The result: no error page, no explanatory message, just a browser that returns a generic error. This approach is problematic, especially since in Belgium, the courts have explicitly requested that users be informed via a redirect page.
If blocking orders become widespread, including in the United States where similar legislation is under consideration, it becomes crucial that the companies concerned adopt more transparent practices. Because without an explanation, it will be impossible for an Internet user to distinguish between a bug, an outage, or a legal block.
Tampering with DNS is tantamount to rewriting the Internet directory. This cannot be done quietly. Court decisions are there to be enforced, but they should not result in technical opacity.
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