In a submission that quietly landed on the European Commission's website, Google has told Brussels something the VPN community has argued for years: blocking DNS resolvers, VPNs and IP addresses to fight piracy is "ineffective," "disproportionate" and causes "significant harm." It is a rare moment - one of the world's largest tech companies publicly defending, in effect, the right to route around network blocks. And it lands just as the same argument is being tested in courtrooms and parliaments on both sides of the Atlantic.
What Google actually submitted
The comments came in response to the European Commission's call for evidence on the review of the EU Copyright Directive. The document was marked "Privileged and Confidential," but it was published on the Commission's own website - so the world can now read exactly how Google views aggressive blocking.
Google does not oppose site blocking outright. Its point is narrower and sharper: blocking aimed at the plumbing of the internet - DNS resolvers, VPN services and shared IP addresses - is the wrong tool. In Google's words, such blocking "is ineffective, as it does not remove content at all and is easily circumvented by using alternative DNS resolvers," and it is "disproportionate, catching lawful services, raising extra-territoriality concerns and blocking entire domains."
The collateral damage, in real examples
The most striking part of the submission is not the theory but the receipts. Google points to concrete cases where infrastructure-level blocking hit the wrong targets:
- Italy's Piracy Shield system blocked a Google Drive subdomain, and at one point blacklisted IP addresses that hosted more than 42 million domains belonging to Cloudflare customers.
- In France, Cisco simply shut down its public OpenDNS resolver for local users rather than comply with court-ordered DNS blockades.
- In Portugal, ISPs once blocked Google IP addresses and knocked out legitimate Google Cloud services in the process.
Each example makes the same point: when you block an IP, a DNS resolver or a VPN endpoint, you rarely hit only the pirate. You hit everyone else sharing that infrastructure - which on the modern internet can mean tens of millions of innocent domains.
Why this is remarkable
Rights holders have spent years framing VPNs and public DNS resolvers as tools that "enable" piracy, and pushing lawmakers to force intermediaries into the role of content police. Europe has largely gone along with it. France did exactly that when its courts ordered ProtonVPN to block pirate domains, treating a privacy service as an enforcement chokepoint.
For Google - a company that also runs a public DNS resolver and is itself a frequent blocking target - to tell the Commission plainly that this approach is counterproductive is a meaningful shift. It puts the technical reality on the official record: these blocks do not remove infringing content, they just break things for everyone else while the determined pirate switches resolvers in seconds.
Part of a bigger pushback
Google's filing does not stand alone. It arrives in the same weeks that Europe's top court, in a landmark ruling, held that VPN providers are neutral intermediaries and not liable when users bypass geo-blocking. Two of the most influential actors in the debate - the EU's highest court and its largest tech company - are now saying, in different registers, the same thing: a VPN is a general-purpose privacy tool, not a piracy machine, and treating the network layer as the enemy does more harm than good.
The timing is not accidental. Google filed its comments just before a US congressional hearing signaled that American site-blocking legislation is closer than ever. The message to Washington is implicit but clear: before you build the same machinery, look at what it has already broken in Europe - and at how easily wholesale network blocking slides from copyright enforcement into outright censorship.
For everyday users, the takeaway is the quiet vindication of something obvious to anyone who values privacy: a VPN and an alternative DNS resolver are ordinary tools for a safer, more resilient connection, not instruments of wrongdoing. When even Google tells regulators that blocking them is ineffective and disproportionate, it strengthens the ground under every person who relies on encryption to reach the open internet.
