France has legalized real-time blocking of pirate sports streams. On 21 July 2026 the Senate gave final approval to the professional sports bill already passed by the National Assembly a day earlier, and its Article 10 rewrites the country's main anti-piracy tool. France's real-time blocking regime is small on paper and large in practice: it removes the human check that used to sit between a rights holder's detection system and an order landing on your provider.
What Article 10 actually changes
Article L. 333-10 of the French Sports Code is the provision rights holders have used for years to knock pirate streams offline during matches. Until now it ran on a manual loop. When a new pirate source surfaced mid-broadcast, sworn agents at Arcom, the French audiovisual and digital regulator, first had to confirm that it really was carrying the match illegally. Only then was the blocking instruction issued. That verification took time, and time is the entire game when a stream only has to survive ninety minutes.
Article 10 deletes the pre-check. Arcom's agents no longer approve each new domain or IP address before it is blocked. They keep an oversight role, but it moves to the back end: they audit additions after the fact, and a party that finds itself blocked can appeal to Arcom's president, in theory even while the event is still running.
How the pipeline is meant to work
- Detection systems identify pirate sources live, during the broadcast.
- New targets, domains or raw IP addresses, are pushed straight to providers with no prior sign-off.
- Providers are expected to act without delay, mid-match.
- Arcom reviews the list afterwards and handles complaints from anyone caught by mistake.
The scale of what this is aimed at is not small. Arcom puts total piracy losses in France at around 1.5 billion euros, of which roughly 300 million falls on sport alone, and its own figures put pirate viewing at about 12 percent of the football audience. The regulator already trialled live IP blocking during Roland Garros and has flagged the 2026 World Cup as the moment to run it at full scale.
VPN providers and DNS resolvers are named, not implied
The important detail for anyone outside the piracy debate is who sits on the receiving end of those lists. This is not only internet service providers. DNS resolvers and VPN providers are covered too, which means an automated, unreviewed feed of blocking targets can now reach the same infrastructure people use for ordinary privacy reasons.
That did not come out of nowhere. France has been building toward it for over a year: ProtonVPN was ordered to filter piracy domains, and a Paris court then told five major VPN providers to block pirate streams. French courts have gone further still, treating a social media post that merely explained how to change your DNS as grounds for keeping 197,000 euros frozen. What Article 10 does is convert those one-off court orders into a standing, automated process.
Foreign leagues get direct access to French courts
Article 10 also opens the door to rights holders based abroad. Organisations that run or hold rights to competitions outside France, Spain's LaLiga and England's Premier League among them, can now bring blocking actions in French courts themselves rather than working through a domestic partner.
That matters because LaLiga is the most aggressive blocker in Europe and has a track record of hitting far more than pirates. Its campaign has already run into resistance: a court in Cordoba threw out LaLiga's fines against NordVPN, a ruling widely read as a limit on how far a league can push intermediaries. France has just handed the same league a new venue.
Europe is pulling in two directions at once
The French law lands in a legal landscape that is anything but settled. Belgium ordered Cloudflare and Google to block pirate IPTV but deliberately spared public DNS resolvers. Bulgaria's Supreme Court went the other way entirely and ruled that site blocking is legally impossible under national law. Canada, meanwhile, extended a blocking order to cover pirate sites that do not exist yet.
There is also a technical objection on record from the largest possible source. Google told the European Commission plainly that blocking VPNs and DNS is both ineffective and harmful, because determined users route around it while everyone else absorbs the breakage. The EU's top court has separately held that VPN providers are not liable when subscribers bypass geo-restrictions. France is legislating in the opposite direction.
For ordinary users the practical consequence is not about football at all. When blocking targets are compiled by machine and reviewed only afterwards, the failures that reach you are the ones nobody screened for: a legitimate site sharing an IP with a pirate stream, a resolver quietly filtered, an app that stops working mid-evening for reasons no support desk can explain. Anyone who cares about a stable, unfiltered connection, whether for legitimate streaming or simply for a working internet, now has a direct stake in how carefully these lists are built.
