Google DNS Blocks: Paris Court Strengthens Rights Holders Against Pirates

Shortly before the turn of the year, the Paris Judicial Court once again took decisive action in the area of copyright protection on the internet. At the request of the media group Canal+ and its subsidiaries, the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris ordered Google to block access to a total of 19 domains and their subpages via its in-house DNS resolution service (resolver). This is intended to help restrict the illegal distribution of live broadcasts of the UEFA Champions League for the current 2025/2026 season. The block applies to French territory, including most overseas territories. It will initially remain in effect until the end of the football competition on May 30.

According to the ruling now published by TorrentFreak, the plaintiffs were able to convince the court that exclusive sports content was regularly streamed without authorization via the mentioned websites such as daddylive3.com or vavoo.to. The judges followed the argument that these constituted "serious and repeated infringements" of broadcasting rights. These must be prevented according to the French Sports Code (Code du sport).

The role of Google as a DNS provider is noteworthy. Access providers in France have long been required to block such sites. However, many users utilize alternative DNS resolvers, such as those from Google, to bypass these web blocks. In its defense, the US corporation attempted to shift responsibility to other actors in the infrastructure chain. It referred, for example, to the principle of subsidiarity: according to this, rights holders should first take action against service providers that are closer to the actual content. In this specific case, this would be, for example, Cloudflare's Content Delivery Network (CDN), through which many of the piracy sites are delivered.

Reference to Cloudflare is not valid

A block at the CDN level would be more effective and targeted, as Google's legal representatives admitted. They also described the requested DNS blocks as disproportionate: they are technically complex and can easily be circumvented by VPN services. Furthermore, there is a risk of accidentally blocking legitimate content.

The court did not accept the objections. It clarified that the law does not prescribe a fixed order in which technical intermediaries rights holders must first proceed against. It is not the task of a DNS provider to dictate an enforcement strategy to affected companies or to demand upfront services from other service providers like Cloudflare. Given that live sports broadcasts lose significant value after their broadcast, the immediacy of the measure is crucial.

The judges granted the Google corporation a deadline of only three days to implement the blocks after the delivery of the ruling. Rights holders can expand the list of domains to be blocked during the ongoing season by reporting to the French media regulatory authority Arcom. As soon as the latter verifies new mirror domains or alternative addresses of the pirate services, Google must also block these in its DNS resolver. In parallel, the Italian communications authority Agcom has imposed a million-euro fine on Cloudflare because the infrastructure giant ignored blocking orders.

(akn)