When the Tools of Piracy Enforcement Become Infrastructure Threats

Christian Dawson is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition), a membership organization for web hosting companies, data centers, domain registrars and registries, cloud infrastructure providers, managed services providers, and related tech.

In February 2024, Italy launched a system called Piracy Shield—an enforcement tool designed to block unauthorized sports streams in real time. It allows rights holders to trigger DNS and IP blocks through a startup-linked platform with no judicial oversight, and forces compliance within 30 minutes from ISPs, DNS resolvers, and VPN providers.

Things went wrong very quickly.

A single Cloudflare IP address—hosting hundreds of thousands of unrelated domains—was blocked, taking down countless legitimate websites across Italy. Later that year, the system mistakenly blacklisted Google Drive’s core subdomain, drive.usercontent.google.com, rendering file access and synchronization tools inoperable nationwide. CDNs serving YouTube were disrupted as well. VPN providers began exiting the Italian market, citing impossible compliance demands and mounting legal uncertainty.

Piracy Shield was built to protect copyrighted material—but it now functions as a blunt instrument destabilizing critical infrastructure. This isn’t a story about Italy alone. It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when governments reach too far down the Internet stack in pursuit of content control.

Across the globe, governments are increasingly using infrastructure-level tools—particularly domain name and IP blocking—as content enforcement shortcuts. In a new report from the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, DNS at Risk, we document more than a dozen such cases from countries including Russia, France, Malaysia, India, and the United States. While the policy objectives vary—from combating piracy to suppressing dissent—the method is often the same: tamper with the systems that make the Internet function.

The risks are enormous.

DNS, the Domain Name System, is one of the foundational protocols of the Internet. It wasn’t built to police content—it was built to translate domain names into IP addresses, enabling users to access websites, services, and applications. When governments compel DNS operators to block specific domain names, they aren’t removing the content. They’re just breaking the pathway to it—while leaving the content online and often accessible through other means. The result is a temporary disruption, not a lasting solution.

DNS resolvers don’t serve individual pieces of content—they serve entire domains. That means blocking at the domain name level doesn’t just remove a single file or stream—it takes down every service linked to that domain, whether infringing or not. Much like IP blocking, which can knock thousands of websites offline with a single enforcement action, domain-level blocking is a blunt tool. Both share the same flaw: they target the infrastructure layer, not the content itself—and in doing so, they risk massive collateral damage.

What makes this especially risky is that much of the Internet’s infrastructure is shared by design. IP addresses, DNS resolvers, and CDN nodes are reused across thousands—or even millions—of unrelated services because they are scarce, expensive to replicate, and essential for speed and performance. It’s similar to how early phone networks or today’s IPv4 address shortages required careful sharing to function at scale.

DNS itself is everywhere for a reason: to ensure fast and reliable service, recursive DNS resolvers are deployed close to end users—often by ISPs, hosting and cloud providers, CDNs, VPN services, and other Internet infrastructure operators. That proximity improves performance, but it also means there’s no single place to block domain name queries. Trying to do so turns the global Internet into a fragmented patchwork—where access depends on which resolver a user happens to be routed through.

When enforcement mandates compel these neutral infrastructure providers to act as content filters, the damage spreads quickly. A policy aimed at one sector, like sports broadcasting, can destabilize services relied on by completely unrelated industries, from healthcare to education to small business. The trust that makes shared infrastructure work in the first place begins to erode.

The unintended consequences of Italy’s Piracy Shield have made global headlines, yet similar systems are being proposed or implemented elsewhere. France’s courts have extended blocking mandates to public DNS providers like Google and Cloudflare. Spain has allowed IP blocks on cloud infrastructure without provider notification. Malaysia attempted a nationwide DNS redirection campaign in 2024—only to roll it back days later following public outcry.

Even in the United States, well-intentioned enforcement has caused harm. In 2011, a domain seizure mistakenly took down over 84,000 lawful subdomains, falsely labeling them as linked to child exploitation. These incidents, regardless of origin, stem from the same error: using technical systems as enforcement mechanisms for policy goals they weren’t designed to handle.

This isn’t just a threat to Internet freedom. It’s a growing business and security risk, a destructive fissure in network efficiency and reliability. Small and mid-sized companies—particularly in cloud, SaaS, and e-commerce—depend on a stable and interoperable Internet to reach global markets. When access is arbitrarily overblocked abroad, thousands of users and lawful websites get caught in the crossfire. The ripple effects are immediate: customer confusion, business disruption, reputational harm, and diminished trust in US infrastructure providers.

There are better options. In 2024, a major pirate streaming platform was successfully taken offline in Vietnam, through legal and diplomatic efforts targeting its hosting infrastructure—not by breaking the DNS. That approach addressed the problem at its source, without destabilizing unrelated services or forcing neutral infrastructure providers into impossible enforcement roles.

Infrastructure neutrality must be preserved. DNS resolvers, CDNs, and routing protocols are part of the connective tissue of the Internet. When they’re turned into levers of content policy enforcement, the entire system becomes more brittle—more prone to failure, fragmentation, and abuse.

The Internet’s original strength was in its simplicity: a shared, neutral, interoperable architecture. The more governments politicize and weaponize Internet infrastructure, the greater the risk that the free world will lose what made the Internet such an engine for global economic growth, social connection, and human creativity in the first place.

To read more and explore global case studies, download the full DNS at Risk report at dnsatrisk.org.