Where websites get blocked without a judge: a country-by-country guide

When Spain's culture ministry had archive.today blocked this week, the striking part was not the target but the paperwork: a complaint, an administrative resolution, a 24-hour judicial rubber stamp that checks fundamental rights and nothing else, and a weekly list that operators apply without asking. That is not a Spanish quirk. In most of the world, the decision to make a website disappear from a country's networks is taken by a ministry, a regulator, a prosecutor or a private clearing house, and a court either signs off after the fact, checks a narrow question, or never sees the file. This guide sorts the countries that block websites by one question: does a judge decide before the block goes live? Where the answer is no, the block is fast, cheap and easy to repeat, which is why the lists grow by hundreds of domains a year, and why the tools that route around them, a foreign DNS resolver, encrypted client hello, a VPN, matter to ordinary readers and not just to pirates.

Three ways to block a site without a trial

The first model is the administrative regulator. Italy's AGCOM has ordered ISPs to block copyright-infringing sites since 2014 on a rights holder's complaint, and since 2024 its Piracy Shield platform lets football and film rights holders upload domains and IP addresses that every Italian provider must block within 30 minutes, with no judge and, as Cloudflare found when it was fined for not complying, no effective appeal. Greece's EDPPI committee at the culture ministry has done the same since 2018 and issued 124 decisions covering 810 IP addresses and 49 domains in 2024. Latvia's broadcasting council NEPLP blocks unlicensed TV, sanctioned Russian media, "content endangering national security" and, since a December 2024 law, pirate sites, and its public register runs past 2,000 domains. Mexico's IMPI, Peru's Indecopi, Uruguay's URSEC, the Philippines' IPOPHL, South Korea's KCSC and Indonesia's communications ministry all issue piracy or content blocks as agencies; South Korea's since 2019 by inspecting the SNI field of HTTPS connections, Indonesia's under a 2020 regulation that Access Now has challenged in court. The second model puts a prosecutor or security body in charge. Russia's Prosecutor General has been able to order Roskomnadzor to block "extremist" content and calls to protest without a court since the 2013 "Lugovoi law", and the categories have grown to cover "fakes" about the army, VPN services and "LGBT propaganda"; courts are involved only for copyright and defamation. Turkey's regulator BTK can block on its own for eight statutory categories and whenever "delay would be inconvenient", with a criminal judgeship of peace confirming afterwards; the Freedom of Expression Association counted 232,000 blocked domains in 2025 and 454 VPN server addresses. Egypt's 2018 cybercrime law lets the prosecution block sites deemed a threat to national security with a court review within 72 hours; India's ministry of electronics blocks under Section 69A through a secret committee whose orders the target usually never sees; Kazakhstan's prosecutor and information ministry, Pakistan's PTA, Bangladesh's BTRC and the Gulf regulators block by notice. The third model is private. Germany's CUII, a clearing house of ISPs and rights holders founded in 2021, decides DNS blocks itself and applies its own 81.5% threshold, with the federal network agency checking only net-neutrality compliance; Portugal's 2015 memorandum lets the inspectorate IGAC and rights holders agree blocks in four to six weeks; Spain's 2021 protocol adds mirror domains weekly, 441 of them this year, without any new decision.

Country by country

The table below is our reading of the law and practice in 40 countries as of September 2026. "Court first" means a judge rules on the merits before providers must block; "partly" means either a formal or after-the-fact judicial step, or a system where some grounds need a court and others do not; "no" means an executive body, regulator or private list is enough. Grounds are the ones most often used, not an exhaustive list.

Why the no-court model spreads

The argument for it is always the same: courts are slow and pirates are fast. A streaming site can change domains in an hour; a Dutch or British blocking order takes months and names the domains it covers. So legislators hand the job to a body that can act in days (Greece, Portugal), hours (Malaysia), or minutes (Italy), and then to a list that updates itself (Spain, Germany, Denmark's mirror extensions). Governments that started with piracy rarely stop there: Italy's AGCOM also blocks gambling on the customs agency's list, France's ARCOM now blocks porn sites that fail age checks, Latvia's NEPLP moved from unlicensed TV to sanctions to "national security" to piracy in five years, and the security services in Russia, Turkey and Egypt use the same ISP hooks for news. The EU's Digital Services Act does not stop any of this; it regulates platforms, not the national bodies that order providers to filter. What no-court systems lack is the part of a trial that protects everyone who is not the defendant: a hearing where the site, or the people who depend on it, can explain what else is on the domain. The Spanish list that swallowed archive.today also contains aws.amazon.com/es, which Bandaancha spotted in 2025; Piracy Shield has blocked Google Drive and Cloudflare addresses; Lithuania's twelve Sputnik sites include a directory of 22,000 stations; Roskomnadzor's 2018 pursuit of Telegram took 18 million Amazon and Google IP addresses offline. In a court, someone would have said so beforehand. In an administrative procedure, the operator applies the list and the public finds out from a block page.

What it means for you

A block ordered without a court is still a block at the provider, and it works the same way everywhere: the ISP either poisons its DNS answer for the domain, drops packets to the IP address, or inspects the server name in the TLS handshake and resets the connection. Each has a matching answer. A DNS resolver outside the provider restores a domain that is only DNS-blocked, which is the cheapest and most common form, and the one Spain's operators use for the culture ministry's list. Encrypted client hello, which Chrome and Firefox support when DNS over HTTPS is on, hides the domain from SNI filters. A VPN moves the whole connection out of the country and defeats all three, which is why regulators in Russia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Venezuela have added VPN services to the same lists. In the EU, using any of these to reach a blocked site is not an offence for the reader; a Córdoba court said as much in May when it refused to let LaLiga fine a VPN provider. The practical rule for readers is simple: if a site vanishes and the block page cites a ministry, a regulator or a "protocol" rather than a court, nobody has ruled that the site is illegal, only that someone asked for it to go, and the ways around it are the same ones this site has described for football streams, sanctioned radio and now a web archive.