This year, we fought back against the return of a terrible idea that hasn’t improved with age: site blocking laws.
More than a decade ago, Congress tried to pass SOPA and PIPA—two sweeping bills that would have allowed the government and copyright holders to quickly shut down entire websites based on allegations of piracy. The backlash was massive. Internet users, free speech advocates, and tech companies flooded lawmakers with protests, culminating in an “Internet Blackout” on January 18, 2012.Americans don’t like government-run internet blacklists, and the bills were ultimately shelved.
But we never believed they were gone for good. The major media and entertainment companies that backed site blocking in the US in 2012 turned to pushing for site-blocking laws in other countries. Rightsholders continued to ask US courts for site-blocking orders, often winning them without a new law. And, sure enough, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and its allies asked Congress to try again.
There were at least three Congressional drafts of site-blocking legislation this year. Representative Zoe Lofgren kicked things off with the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA). Fellow house member Darrell Issa also claimed to be working on a bill that would make it easy for a studio to block access to a website based solely on the belief that infringement was happening. The Senate Judiciary Committee even produced the terribly named Block BEARD Act.
None of these three attempts to fundamentally alter the way you experience the internet moved very far after their initial announcements. But the sheer number of proposals tells us there’s once again an appetite among major media conglomerates and politicians to resurrect SOPA/PIPA from the dead.
none of these proposals fixes the flaws of SOPA/PIPA, and none ever could. Site blocking is a flawed idea and a disaster for free expression that no amount of rewriting will fix. There’s no way to create a fast lane for removing access to a website that isn’t a major threat to the open web.Just as we opposed SOPA/PIPA over ten years ago,we oppose these efforts.
Site blocking bills seek to build a new infrastructure of censorship into the heart of the internet. They would enable court orders directed to organizations that make the internet work—like internet service providers, domain name resolvers, and reverse proxy services—compelling them to block US internet users from visiting websites accused of copyright infringement. The technical means haven’t changed much as 2012. They involve blocking Internet Protocol addresses or domain names. These methods are blunt instruments, not precise tools. Today, many websites are hosted on cloud infrastructure or use shared IP addresses. Blocking one target can mean blocking thousands of unrelated sites. This digital collateral damage has already happened in Austria, Italy, South Korea, France, and the US, to name a few.
Given this downside, you’d think the benefits of copyright enforcement from these bills ought to be significant. But site blocking is easily evaded. determined site owners can create the same content on a new domain within hours. Users who want to see blocked content can use a VPN or change a single DNS setting to get back online.
The limits lawmakers have proposed for these laws are an illusion. While ostensibly aimed at “foreign” websites, they sweep in any website that doesn’t conspicuously display a US origin, putting anonymity at risk. And despite the rhetoric from the MPA and others, these laws wouldn’t be used only by responsible companies against the largest criminal syndicates. New censorship powers invite abuse by opportunists large and small, and the costs to the economy, security, and free expression are widely borne.
It’s time for Big Media and its friends in Congress to drop this flawed idea. But as long as they keep bringing it up, we’ll keep rallying internet users of all stripes to fight it.
This article is part of our Year in Review series.Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.
