French court orders Google/CloudFlare/Cisco public DNS to block pirate sites, affecting “up to” 800 users

#Abstract: A French court ordered Google, CloudFlare, and Cisco's public DNS systems to block 117 pirated websites involving the Premier League and the Champions League, which may affect “up to” 800 French users. Google's lawyers believe that this blocking measure is almost ineffective, and users can switch to other DNS to bypass the blocking. After calculation, only about 800 users were affected because they did not switch to other DNS or use VPN. View the full text: https://ourl.co/104495

According to TorrentFreak, a website that focuses on ISP and streaming copyright issues, in May, at the request of copyright holders, the Paris Court of France ordered Google, CloudFlare and Cisco to block about 117 pirated website domain names in their public DNS systems.

The websites blocked this time mainly involve copyrighted content of the Premier League and the Champions League. The copyright holder who submitted the application is Canal+, which also requires local French ISPs, or network operators, to block these domain names through the DNS system.

Google, CloudFlare and Cisco operate the world's top public DNS systems, with Google's being 8.8.8.8, CloudFlare's being 1.1.1.1, and Cisco's being the OpenDNS system.

These public DNS system operators must resolve the domain names of these pirated websites to wrong IP addresses in accordance with the court's requirements to block the connection. Of course, the scope of the blocked connection is limited to France.

Initially, the copyright holders asked the court to order ISPs in France to perform the blocking through their own DNS systems, but obviously savvy users will change DNS to bypass the blocking. Choosing Google, CloudFlare and Cisco's DNS are all good choices. This is why Canal + now requires these public DNS systems to block these domain names as well.

So did these blocks work? In some ways, they did, as they affected “up to” 800+ French users from accessing these pirate sites.

Google's lawyers analyzed data from Arcom, the French audiovisual and digital communications regulator, and found that Google, CloudFlare and Cisco's DNS blocking of pirated websites affects approximately 0.084% of French users. However, these affected users will also look for other circumvention methods such as continuing to change DNS or using VPN. Ultimately, only about 2% of users (2% of this 0.084%) will give up continuing to visit these pirated websites.

Based on relevant public data, Google's lawyers believe that this affected approximately 800 French users, so the actual impact can be said to be minimal or non-existent.

Google plans to comply with this decision by blocking these pirated domain names. At the same time, Google has already deleted these domain names from search results so that users cannot find these websites directly through keyword searches.

It is unclear whether CloudFlare and Cisco will also comply with this decision, but since it is a court order, these companies will usually comply as long as the dispute is not particularly large.

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