As the pirate sites escape the conventional blockages set up by access providers, the rights holders turn to another Internet brick: public DNS resolters, these services offered by Google (8.8.8.8), Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) or Opendns, Cisco subsidiary. For the past year, court decisions have been accumulating in Europe – especially in France, Belgium and Italy – to force these companies to prevent access to certain areas linked to streaming or illegal download.
Three giants, three radically different approaches
But touching the DNS is not a small technical adjustment. It is to attack a pillar of the Internet, the one who translates each domain name into an IP address. And depending on how this intervention is implemented, this can go completely unnoticed for the user … or on the contrary arouse distrust. Who blocked this site? Is it a breakdown? Censorship? A bug of my browser? In the absence of transparency, Internet users are often left in the blur.
Faced with judicial injunctions, Opendns made a radical decision: leaving the countries concerned. In France as in Belgium, the company has suspended access to its service, actually preventing all residents from using it, it doesn’t matter if they consulted or not sites. This method has the merit of clarity … but penalizes all users without distinction.
Cloudflare, conversely, opted for a more granular solution. When a user tries to access a site blocked from a country concerned, an HTTP 451 error message appears, reporting that the content is restricted for legal reasons. The explanation is clear, documented, and even refers to the Lumen database, which lists the requests for withdrawal or blocking content on a global scale.
At Google, it’s radio silence. The DNS solver simply rejects requests related to prohibited areas. Result: no error page, no explanatory message, just a browser that returns a generic error. An approach that poses a problem, especially in Belgium, justice explicitly asked that users be informed via a redirection page.
If blocking orders are led to generalize, including in the United States where similar legislation is under study, it becomes crucial that the companies concerned adopt more readable practices. Because in the absence of an explanation, impossible for an internet user to distinguish between a bug, a cut, or a legal blockage.
Touching DNS amounts to rewrite the Internet directory. You can’t do it out. Justice decisions are there to be applied, but they should not result in technical opacity.
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