Spain blocked a batch of piracy domains and took down payment processors and a national healthcare provider with them. Italy’s Piracy Shield caught, by one academic count, at least “hundreds of legitimate websites [that were] unknowingly affected by blocking.” Both are now the model for a bill sitting in the House Judiciary Committee.
US Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) submitted the American Copyright Protection Act of 2026 this week. It would let copyright holders get court orders forcing internet service providers, domain name resolution services and virtual private networks to block foreign piracy websites.
The text isn’t on the congressional website yet. It’s been circulating anyway, and Public Knowledge provided a copy.
The 100,000-user line is where this gets interesting
The blocking obligation attaches to ISPs, DNS providers and VPN services with at least 100,000 monthly users or subscribers in the US. That’s a low bar for a VPN and a nearly invisible one for a public DNS resolver.
Root nameserver operators and top-level domain registries are carved out. So is Wi-Fi offered on the premises of airports, libraries, restaurants, retail stores and similar establishments. Your coffee shop’s router is safe. Your resolver isn’t.
A copyright owner would first ask a court to declare an online location a “foreign piracy site” on “a preponderance of the evidence” that it’s a foreign site primarily designed for piracy. Preponderance is the civil standard, not the criminal one. After that declaration, the owner petitions for the order that reaches the network operators.
Fourteen days, unless a judge says otherwise
Service providers would generally get 14 days to file objections. Judges could modify deadlines “to address time-sensitive events,” which is the provision that makes fast blocking of live streams possible, or of anything pirated within 24 hours of release.
That’s the part Issa has been most open about wanting. At a June 30 hearing he said the DMCA process isn’t fast enough. “While millions of listings for copyright-infringing content are removed every day under [the] notice-and-takedown process set forth in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, right-holders have raised concerns with the speed,” Issa said.
Then he asked: “Can we do it at the speed of sound? Can we do it at the speed of light? More importantly, in a 45-minute or sometimes a fraction of that live sports broadcast, can we do it soon enough to make it no longer profitable for those who pop up and sell their clandestine wares?”
Issa has argued that online piracy helps fund terrorist groups and other criminal networks. He chairs the subcommittee on courts, intellectual property, artificial intelligence and the internet, and he’s retiring from the House at the end of this year.
DNS blocking doesn’t respect borders
Here’s the technical objection that doesn’t get enough air. A residential ISP block affects that ISP’s customers. A DNS resolver block affects everyone using that resolver, wherever they are.
“Rather than attacking the problem at its source by bringing the people running overseas piracy websites to court, Congress and its entertainment industry allies have decided to build out a sweeping infrastructure for censorship,” said Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel at Public Knowledge. “Site-blocking orders force any service provider, from residential broadband providers to global DNS resolvers, to disrupt traffic from targeted websites simply accused of copyright infringement.”
Applying orders to DNS resolvers, Rose said, “means that one court can cut off access to a website globally, based on a single individual’s filing and an expedited procedure. Blocking orders are incredibly powerful weapons, ripe for abuse, and we’ve seen the messy consequences of them being implemented in other countries.”
Compelling VPN services to block anything may be hard even with a court order behind it. Orders aimed at broadband and DNS providers are a different matter. Those work.
The overblocking record is already written
Researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands published a report in September 2025 on Italy’s Piracy Shield and found at least “hundreds of legitimate websites [were] unknowingly affected by blocking.” Cloudflare has been fighting an Italian fine over its refusal to block sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, calling Piracy Shield “a misguided Italian regulatory scheme designed to protect large rightsholder interests at the expense of the broader Internet.”
A letter to Issa from the Computer & Communications Industry Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, Public Knowledge and the R Street Institute put Spain’s experience on the record. “In Spain, overblocking has caused outages to payment processors and a national healthcare provider, as well as giving rise to multiple grassroots movements against site-blocking. The idea that site blocking is a ‘solved problem,’ politically or technologically, is a myth,” the letter said.
Public Knowledge’s response to the bill this week said “small businesses and nonprofits face the greatest risks for site blocking but have the fewest protections. In Europe, we’ve seen overblocking bring down digital infrastructure for hotels, car mechanics, retail shops, telehealth programs, and even a nunnery.”
And there’s no refund. Operators of blocked sites would “have no remedy for the days or weeks (or more) of lost business that result from an overzealous blocking order,” Public Knowledge said. “America’s small businesses cannot afford to be treated as ‘acceptable collateral damage’ for multibillion-dollar entertainment and sports industries.”
The Re:Create coalition said the bill would codify “a one-sided legal process modeled on European site-blocking laws, which have been shown to cause widespread censorship.” Executive Director Brandon Butler said “forcing infrastructure providers, DNS resolvers, and VPNs to filter internet traffic threatens user privacy and risks catastrophic collateral damage to the open web,” adding that the “fast-track site-blocking scheme bypasses effective legal channels, undermines the digital ecosystem, invites copyright abuse—disrupting small businesses, nonprofit and Internet users across the globe.”
This is the third try in 20 months
Issa’s bill isn’t a partisan outlier. It’s the newest entry in a run of proposals from both parties, all pursuing what the Motion Picture Association has been asking for.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) proposed the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act in January 2025. Two Democratic senators and two Republican senators introduced the Block Bad Electronic Art and Recording Distributors Act in July 2025.
“Foreign websites pirating American movies, TV shows, art, and books steal tens of billions of dollars from the US economy each year,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said at the time. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) called it “a smart, targeted tool to stop these criminal operations at the source without infringing on legitimate speech or due process.”
The MPA escalated its campaign starting in April 2024, when CEO Charles Rivkin said the group would “work with members of Congress” to require ISPs to block piracy sites. Its letter for Issa’s June 2026 hearing pointed at “more than fifty countries around the world” that already block. “Unfortunately, the United States still lacks a site-blocking mechanism to combat digital piracy,” the letter said. “As a result, America’s creative economy is being robbed of billions of dollars in lost revenues and hundreds of thousands of jobs.”
Three bills, no law, and a lobbying push that keeps finding sponsors on both sides of the aisle. If you run a public DNS resolver or a VPN with more than 100,000 US subscribers, the number to watch isn’t whether this particular bill passes. It’s how many more get filed before one does.
