Brussels, BELGIUM – As the football World Cup kicks off, EU and national policymakers should rein in automated web-blocking systems that allow private parties to restrict access to online services without proper judicial oversight, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA Europe) warns.
These anti-piracy systems rely on blunt blocking of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and the Domain Name System (DNS), thereby undermining the Digital Services Act (DSA), disrupting lawful services, and infringing Europeans’ fundamental rights despite limited effectiveness.
To mark the tournament’s start, CCIA Europe is launching a new explainer (‘Fighting Piracy Without Breaking the Internet’) that details these risks, explaining why infrastructure-level blocking is a crude, disproportionate response to illegal sports streaming – concerns that are further substantiated by recent independent academic research.
Recent anti-piracy plans announced by UEFA ahead of the World Cup, which seek to combine deeper online monitoring with dynamic blocking, risk scaling up the most problematic elements of national experiments already backfiring in France, Italy, and Spain.
In Spain, LaLiga uses a single limited court order to justify aggressive general IP-address blocking, with little transparency and no redress for wrongly blocked services. Italy’s automated Piracy Shield has repeatedly caused serious collateral damage. France, meanwhile, has expanded blocking obligations beyond internet providers to DNS resolvers, content delivery networks (CDNs), proxy services, and virtual private networks (VPNs).
The result is widespread overblocking that routinely takes lawful businesses, educational platforms, public services, and cloud-hosted tools offline. It also pressures neutral intermediaries, including VPNs and CDNs, to take actions that are technically unworkable, legally questionable, or incompatible with their role in keeping the internet open and secure.
Scaling these tactics across Europe during the World Cup would normalise privatised online censorship. CCIA Europe urges policymakers to defend the rule of law and the DSA by ensuring that no private organisation can block content without meaningful court scrutiny.
The following can be attributed to CCIA Europe’s Intellectual Property and Audiovisual Policy Manager, Charlotte Dantin:
“Major sporting events must not become a testing ground for private, automated censorship of internet infrastructure. Illegal streaming can and should be addressed, but enforcement must remain lawful, proportionate, and subject to independent judicial oversight.”
“The mistakes already visible in national blocking experiments should not be allowed to proliferate across the EU. When IP addresses are added to opaque blocking lists without continuous court review or meaningful redress, innocent businesses and users suffer. Piracy enforcement must target pirates, not the basic infrastructure that underpins the internet.”
Notes for editors
The concerns raised by CCIA Europe are independently validated by a recent, separate piece of legal research. An April 2026 study titled ‘Between Effectiveness and Fundamental Rights: Sports Piracy and the Privatization of Copyright Enforcement in the EU’, authored by researchers at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Valencia, confirms the structural risks of overblocking and concludes that privatised enforcement mechanisms jeopardise the EU Digital Services Act.
