Republican bill would order ISPs, DNS providers, and VPNs to block piracy sites

Issa’s bill was referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary. Issa is the chair of a subcommittee on courts, intellectual property, artificial intelligence, and the Internet. The text of Issa’s “American Copyright Protection Act of 2026” is not on the congressional website yet, but it has been circulating, and Public Knowledge provided us with a copy. The bill proposes having courts issue site-blocking orders to ISPs, DNS providers, and VPN services that have at least 100,000 monthly users or subscribers in the US. The bill specifies that blocking requirements would not apply to root nameserver operators and top-level domain registries. It would also exclude Wi-Fi networks offered on the premises of airports, libraries, restaurants, retail stores, and similar establishments. Under Issa’s proposed system, a copyright owner could ask a court to issue a declaration that an online location is a “foreign piracy site” based on “a preponderance of the evidence” that it is a foreign site primarily designed for piracy. After a court makes that declaration, the copyright owner could petition for a court order requiring network operators to block the alleged piracy site. Service providers would generally have 14 days to file objections, but judges would have authority to modify deadlines “to address time-sensitive events.” That provision would allow quicker blocking of websites that air pirated content live or within 24 hours of its release. The Re:Create coalition said Issa’s bill would codify “a one-sided legal process modeled on European site-blocking laws, which have been shown to cause widespread censorship.” “Forcing infrastructure providers, DNS resolvers, and VPNs to filter internet traffic threatens user privacy and risks catastrophic collateral damage to the open web,” Re:Create Executive Director Brandon Butler said. “This 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.” Issa received a letter from other groups that warned site-blocking systems in other countries have disrupted legitimate websites while criminals found ways to evade enforcement. “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,” said the letter 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. In a September 2025 report on Italy’s Piracy Shield system, researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands said they found that at least “hundreds of legitimate websites [were] unknowingly affected by blocking.” As we’ve previously written, Cloudflare has been fighting a fine issued by Italy over its refusal to block access to websites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service. Cloudflare called Piracy Shield “a misguided Italian regulatory scheme designed to protect large rightsholder interests at the expense of the broader Internet.” The response Public Knowledge issued to Issa’s 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.” Public Knowledge said 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. America’s small businesses cannot afford to be treated as ‘acceptable collateral damage’ for multibillion-dollar entertainment and sports industries.”