Website blocking is becoming more and more popular, at least rights owners and authorities are increasingly enforcing it. DNS resolvers have also come under scrutiny for a while, but Cloudflare says that’s a step too far and the company wants to fight back. Web blocks are no longer a rarity in Germany, and people in other countries also like to resort to them, for example, or above all, to take action against copyright infringement. As a rule, the court’s order blocking of piracy sites, which the providers have to implement, sometimes even doing so voluntarily.
According to the CDN provider Cloudflare, which recently published its current transparency report for the second half of 2021, such court orders are usually complied with, at least after considering the potential impact on freedom of expression. Mind you, these blocks are local and not global, so only where you are required to do so. TorrentFreak refers here as an example of DDL Music in Germany, which had to be blocked after a lawsuit by Universal Music.
That’s nothing new in itself, but according to Cloudflare, anti-piracy efforts are increasingly trying to extend blocking to DNS resolvers. However, this does not turn the block into geo-blocking but has worldwide consequences. “Since such a ban would apply to all resolver users worldwide, regardless of where they are located, end-users outside the jurisdiction of the blocking government would also be affected,” writes Cloudflare.
“As a result, we treat any governmental request or court order to block content as a global blocking request or order via a globally available public recursive resolver.” According to Cloudflare, no content has been blocked via the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver: “In view of the far-reaching extraterritorial effect as well as the different global approaches to DNS-based blocking, Cloudflare appealed before it issued requests to block access to domains or content has complied with the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver or has identified alternative mechanisms to comply with relevant court orders.”
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