Issa's site-blocking bill reaches DNS resolvers: one US court order could hide a website from the whole world

Representative Darrell Issa filed the American Copyright Protection Act on 14 September, and the bill, now H.R. 10364 in the House Judiciary Committee, would give copyright holders a fast-track court procedure to obtain "blocking orders" against foreign websites accused of piracy. The orders would bind US broadband providers and, beyond them, any service provider that helps a user reach the site, and that wording pulls in the public DNS resolvers run by Cloudflare, Google and others, the address books that a large share of the world's devices consult before every connection. Public Knowledge, the Washington digital-rights group, put the consequence in one line on Tuesday: an order served on a global resolver is a global block, and "one court can cut off access to a website globally, based on a single individual's filing and an expedited procedure".

What the bill does

The introduced text was not yet public when this article was written, so the mechanics below come from two places: the discussion draft that TorrentFreak reviewed in June 2025, and Public Knowledge's description of the bill it saw on Tuesday. The draft asked the Judicial Conference of the United States to keep a list of district judges, at least one per circuit, who would hear every blocking case. A copyright owner would first have to convince one of them that a site is a "foreign piracy site": run from abroad or by an operator who cannot be found after a reasonable search, with infringement as its primary purpose and no significant lawful use, or marketed to induce infringement. The judge could then issue an order requiring named service providers to take "all reasonable steps" to keep US users off the site, without prescribing the technique. Orders would run for up to twelve months, providers would get ten days to comply, and rights holders could ask for less when a live event is at stake. The draft excluded providers with fewer than 50,000 users a year, internet providers with 1 percent or less of the US market, and premises such as coffee shops, libraries and universities; root and top-level nameservers were carved out, public resolvers above the threshold were not. The Copyright Office would publish every active order, providers acting in good faith would be immune from liability, and a third party whose site was blocked through a rights holder's error could claim up to $250,000 from that rights holder.

Why a resolver order is not a US order

Site blocking in Europe usually works through the access provider: your ISP's resolver stops answering for the domain, or its routers drop the IP address. The effect ends at the provider's own customers. A public resolver is a different object. Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 and Google's 8.8.8.8 answer queries from every country, they are the default in many routers, browsers and operating systems, and they have one policy per domain rather than one per jurisdiction. Rights holders have noticed. In 2024 a Paris court ordered Google, Cloudflare and Cisco to block pirate sports domains on their resolvers for Canal+, and Google told the European Commission this summer that blocking at the DNS and VPN layer is ineffective and harmful. Sony spent three years in German courts trying to force the Swiss non-profit resolver Quad9 to block a music site, and lost. Google and Cloudflare complied with the French orders by withholding answers only from users whose IP address places them in France, and the same geofencing is used for Italy. That is an engineering choice, not a legal one: nothing in the draft says an order stops at the border, and a judge who wants a site gone for US users has no reason to care whether the cheapest way to do it also removes it for a user in Lisbon or Jakarta. Public Knowledge's reading is that the incentive runs toward the global answer. Public Knowledge's other point is about who gets hit by accident. Italy's Piracy Shield, which orders IP-level blocks within 30 minutes, has disrupted hundreds of legitimate websites according to a University of Twente study, and the group listed hotels, car mechanics, retail shops, telehealth programmes and a nunnery among the collateral. The $250,000 clause in the Issa draft is an acknowledgement that the same thing will happen here; it is also a ceiling, and it pays only when the error is the rights holder's rather than the provider's.

What changes for users

Nothing in the draft makes it an offence for a person to reach a blocked site; the orders are addressed to providers, and the immunity and compensation clauses are all about them. In practice, a DNS-only block is undone by using a resolver that has not received the order, and a block at the ISP's routers is undone by a VPN, whose tunnel carries the DNS lookup and the traffic past both. That is why the bills keep widening the list of providers they can reach, and why France has already served blocking orders on VPN services directly, as it did when a Paris court told Proton VPN and others to block pirate domains. The ratchet is the story: each layer that is blocked pushes users one layer down, and the next bill names that layer. For anyone outside the United States, the practical lesson from H.R. 10364 is simpler and arrives sooner: if a device uses an American public resolver by default, the answers it gets are about to depend on American copyright litigation.