Feddit.onlineU.S. Lawmakers Work on Unified Site-Blocking Bill to Counter Online Piracy * TorrentFreak
torrentfreak.com/u-s-lawmakers-work-on-unified-…
Last week’s Supreme Court decision in Cox Communications reshaped the piracy liability landscape, creating new urgency for site-blocking.
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RiskableSupreme Court opinion, the majority’s decision “permits ISPs to sell an internet connection to every single infringer who wants one without fear of liability and without lifting a finger to prevent infringement.”
Yes. That’s how that works. That’s how it’s supposed to work. We do not want ISPs to be liable for what happens on the Internet because they run the roads.
I’d be willing to accept an argument that ISPs are providing critical infrastructure and therefore should be nationalized in a similar way to Switzerland, but until that happens, they shouldn’t have any say whatsoever in who or what content gets to be online. The moment you require that of them is the moment that everyone’s traffic will be inspected and judged according to someone else’s sense of morality.
Want some proof of how this can go horribly wrong? Put me in charge of DNS at one of the big ISPs for a month. They don’t get to overrule my decisions! I’ll make sure every conservative website, every politician that supports legislation like this, and every big company that supports it will fail to resolve.
In fact, I might go even further and redirect Netflix, Hulu, and all other streaming sites to pirate equivalents just to make the point. Hopefully, forever.
What would be wrong with that? Clearly, my moral decisions are the right ones! Don’t like it? Take it up with the legal framework bills like this have put into place to protect victims of such abuse: Spend a few million litigating for your rights!
Oh yeah, Russian playbok completely, lol. In Russia they begun their censorship with a premise of fighting piracy.
In fact they pioneered the toolset to prohibit any webpage they don’t like.
It took only a couple of years before political opposition websites became illegal
And now look at them - Actual Whitelist internet. (If you don’t know what whitelist is - they only allow you to visit certain webpages, and block all other traffic, and this is not the exaggeration, it happens right now).
So the USA is planning a Great Firewall, much like a certain other country that we claim “lacks freedom.” If I didn’t know any better, I might think that my government was self-serving, hypocritical, and corrupt, but that’s impossible. We’re the freest nation in the history of the world.
God forbid we do the other thing where reasonably priced and accessible media are made available for purchase without an infinite copyright glitch.
They could just provide cheap high quality streaming services to end piracy, but instead they want to provide garbage multi-tier advertising enabled massively fractured streaming service and force people to subscribe by playing a lamesauce game of pirate whack-a-mole.
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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
But Bruh, Microsoft is allowed to do it because we’re in business with Microsoft! - Government
“Rules for thee, not for me”
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.
Gee, I wonder why.
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.
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Yes, but how does this connect together? I don’t believe for a minute that it’s coincidence.
23.6m if this is true, I am disgusted at how cheap it is to corrupt an entire legal system.
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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.
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.
Can still be messed with by the Isp not saying dns encrypt is a solution but it will bypass this, not much it can do against direct IP blocking mind you for that you need vpn or a service like tor/i2p.
Does stop the this has been blocked by court order type messages though and does it well.
Not as easily though. It’s like regular HTTPS - if anyone, including the ISP, tries a MitM (man in the middle) attack, you’ll get a security error because the certificate won’t be trusted. The only real way for a MitM attack to be successful is installing a custom root certificate on the client system.
Like you mentioned, IP blocking is harder to bypass, but that’s unrelated to DNS blocking. IP blocking is harder to do if the site uses a CDN like CloudFront, BunnyCDN, Cloudflare, etc though, since a large number of sites use the same IPs.
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?
On the contrary, we should keep using clearnet to keep it easy for newcomers.
Authoritarian countries like the US can just fuck off and the rest of us will be fine. I’ve been doing clearnet piracy with no VPN for over 2 decades now.
After 30 years of playing whack-a-mole with piracy sites, this time it will surely help.
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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
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.
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I’m totally fine with them thinking they did an effective job while leaving easy ways to circumvent their restrictions.
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
Or USA, apparently
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.
We need French people in the US to teach them how to burn down government buildings