Last week’s Supreme Court decision in Cox Communications reshaped the piracy liability landscape, creating new urgency for site-blocking.
Literally every single large AI provider admits to committing large scale piracy. No congressional response.
Some members of the public are watching HBO shows because they’re poor? FULL FORCE OF THE LAW
Good news for fascists since it means there will be an easy way to force ISPs to block all “unlawful” content like Wikipedia or any other site that gives educational information to refute their current agendas or reflects opposing opinions that they consider “alternative facts”.
Most isps just mess with the DNS, dnscrypt is a solution to make sure they can’t. Best solution is not using dns in the first place though.
Yeah, I have my own DNS server that caches from multiple backing servers as needed. I’m not worried about DNS blocking, it’s never been effective. The issue is ISP level blocking usually isnt just DNS blocking, it’s also involves IP level blocking, many of which dont work on IPv6 which is one reason (besides just resistance to replacing old hardware) it hasn’t been adopted widely by consumer ISPs. If you have only a single, unchangeable (by anyone other than them) IP address, they have much more control and your traffic is much easier to track and manipulate.
And there is even lower level blocking at lower layers of the network stack. ISPs can intercept and mangle packet’s destinations at any layer because your traffic must go through them and so your networking equipment must trust their equipment to properly route traffic. They don’t do it now mostly because it means adding a lot more processing power to analyze every packet. I do it all the time at home to block ads and other malicious traffic. But if they’re required to upgrade to allow for that level of traffic analysis, by law, then that opens the floodgates for all kinds of manipulation either politically or capitalistically nefarious in nature.
Best solution is not using dns in the first place though.
Use DNS over HTTPS (or TLS or QUIC). I think some browsers use it by default now. If there’s country-specific blocks, use your own recursive DNS server, or one in another country.
Sooner everything moves to something like i2p the better, there’s no reason to be using the clearnet imo.
It’s just a safer way of doing things and eventually things will be driven that direction anyway.
I’m a bit behind on it, is i2p still dreadfully slow?
Ahhhh, there comes the american own great firewall, fantastic…
Wonder if we will suddenly see this same bullshit pop up in all the pro age verification countries now or a tad later to make it less obvious.
Several such movements have been going around since around September 2025, with some countries’ governments, e.g. Brazil’s current one, pushing for such for longer.
Eyyy I love that this link is making the rounds. Can’t take credit for the graph, but happy to help broaden visibility.
I’m curious to know the connections between this and Collective Shout.
I guess they’re the group that was behind the Itch censorship.
The group rose to prominence in 2025 after lobbying for the digital distribution platforms Steam and Itch.io to remove hundreds of video games that they said featured themes such as rape, incest, and sexual violence, which resulted in Itch.io temporarily deindexing all not-safe-for-work adult games.[5] Collective Shout’s campaigning against violent adult games, in collaboration with payment processors, has raised concerns about financial censorship,[6] effects on LGBTQ+ games,[5][6][7] and creative freedom.[8]
Haven’t other countries tried DNS level site blocking, and it’s very easy to get around? Does it even make any difference? The strategy of ISP copyright letters has already trained Americans to use VPNs for this, it seems like the only difference will be that I will have to turn my VPN on before searching for torrents instead of just before actually opening my torrent client
I’m totally fine with them thinking they did an effective job while leaving easy ways to circumvent their restrictions.
DNS blocking is a paper wall indeed. However, this is just a step one. VPNs are already a target, so this will help them with justifying step 2 - introducing DPI to monitor all traffic and proactively block new VPNs and other obfuscation methods. Step 3 is more or less final, it’s when they realize this is also not quite as efficient as they’d like and they’ll get tired of the constant cat and mouse game, so the solution would have to be whitelisting approved websites and blocking everything else. It’s amazing for billionaires and their corpos as that makes it nearly impossible for new projects to enter the market, and it’s great for governments that desperately want to be authoritarian, but pesky constitutions, privacy laws and some such are getting in the way.
After 30 years of playing whack-a-mole with piracy sites, this time it will surely help.
So how would this work theoretically? People in the states would just be prohibited from accessing certain sites and Google would remove them from results of searchs?
Yes. Federal internet filter
Welcome to China
Or Russia
Google already remove results in certain countries based on local laws, and as a response to DMCA complaints.
Its crazy how well the foot in the door technique works.
