A new Belgian site-blocking order shows how far anti-piracy enforcement in Europe now reaches into the internet's plumbing. Obtained by broadcasters RTL Belgium and RTBF, the order does not just tell internet providers to block five illegal IPTV services. It also names Cloudflare and Google directly, pulling content-delivery and platform giants into the blocking machine. Yet in the same order the court quietly stepped back from one front: it did not force Cloudflare and Google to block through their public DNS resolvers.
What the Belgian order actually does
Belgium has become one of Europe's busiest testing grounds for site blocking. Its two-step system, where a court issues an injunction and a government body then decides how it is applied, has produced a steady stream of orders since the framework launched in 2025. This latest one targets five pirate IPTV operations and, notably, extends beyond ordinary access providers to Cloudflare and Google. The message is clear: rights holders no longer stop at the ISP layer, they want the companies that host, route and surface content to act too.
Why DNS was spared this time
The striking detail is what the order left out. Cloudflare and Google were not required to block the sites through their public DNS resolvers, a retreat that almost certainly reflects the legal blowback from earlier Belgian mandates. Previous DNS-blocking orders were contentious enough that Cisco temporarily pulled its OpenDNS service out of the country rather than comply. Infrastructure companies have argued for a while that forcing DNS resolvers to censor is both technically clumsy and easy to bypass. Google has made that case bluntly to European regulators, warning that blocking VPNs and DNS is ineffective and harmful and risks widespread overblocking of legitimate services.
Blocking is climbing the internet stack
The bigger pattern is that blocking orders keep moving up the stack. They began at the ISP level, then reached content-delivery networks and DNS resolvers, and they are now increasingly aimed at VPN providers too. France offered the clearest example when a Paris court ordered five major VPNs to block pirate streams. Each new layer that courts try to enlist widens the collateral damage, because DNS resolvers, CDNs and VPNs are shared infrastructure used by millions of ordinary people for privacy, security and everyday browsing, not just by a handful of pirates.
Where the law is pushing back
Enforcement is not advancing unopposed. The same week, Europe's top court delivered a counterweight, ruling that VPNs are a legitimate technology and providers are not liable when users bypass geo-blocking. Elsewhere, Bulgaria's Supreme Court found broad pirate-site blocking legally impossible under its rules. The result is a fragmented map: some courts keep expanding orders up the stack, while others draw hard limits, and the Belgian DNS carve-out sits right on that fault line.
For a regular user, the practical takeaway is about resilience rather than piracy. As filtering spreads across ISPs, DNS and platforms, the parts of your connection you actually control matter more. A VPN encrypts your traffic and moves your DNS lookups off a filtered local resolver, which is why courts keep eyeing it, and it is also why the legal recognition that VPNs are lawful technology matters so much. The direction of travel in Europe is more filtering at more layers, and knowing which layer is doing the blocking is the first step to understanding what still works.
