When Spain shut off a group of piracy domains, payment processors and a national healthcare provider went dark alongside them. One academic tally of Italy’s Piracy Shield counted at least “hundreds of legitimate websites [that were] unknowingly affected by blocking.” Those two systems are precisely what a bill now parked in the House Judiciary Committee is modeled on.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) filed the American Copyright Protection Act of 2026 this week. Under it, rights holders could obtain court orders compelling internet service providers, domain name resolution services and virtual private networks to cut off access to foreign piracy websites.
Congress hasn’t posted the text yet. Copies have been passed around regardless, and Public Knowledge supplied one.
Everything turns on the 100,000-user threshold
Blocking duties kick in for ISPs, DNS providers and VPN services counting at least 100,000 monthly US users or subscribers. For a VPN that threshold is easy to clear; for a public DNS resolver it is barely a threshold at all.
Exemptions exist for root nameserver operators and top-level domain registries, along with Wi-Fi provided on-site at airports, libraries, restaurants, retail stores and comparable venues. The router at your local cafe is in the clear. The resolver you point at is not.
The sequence starts with a copyright owner asking a court to label an online location a “foreign piracy site,” showing on “a preponderance of the evidence” that it is a foreign operation built mainly for piracy. That is the civil burden of proof, not the criminal one. Once the declaration is in hand, the owner goes back for the order that binds the network operators.
Two weeks to object, at the judge’s discretion
As a rule, service providers would have 14 days to lodge objections. But judges could shift those deadlines “to address time-sensitive events” — the hook that would allow live streams, or anything pirated inside 24 hours of release, to be blocked in a hurry.
Speed is the piece Issa has talked about most plainly. The DMCA, he argued at a June 30 hearing, simply moves too slowly. “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.
His follow-up questions: “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 also made the case that piracy revenue flows to terrorist groups and other criminal networks. He chairs the subcommittee on courts, intellectual property, artificial intelligence and the internet, and he leaves the House when this year ends.
A DNS block doesn’t stop at the border
One technical point deserves far more attention than it gets. Block something at a residential ISP and the effect lands on that ISP’s subscribers. Block it at a DNS resolver and everyone querying that resolver is affected, no matter what country they sit in.
“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.”
Extending those 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.”
Forcing a VPN service to block anything could prove difficult, court order or not. Orders directed at broadband and DNS providers are another story entirely. Those are effective.
The evidence on overblocking already exists
A September 2025 report from researchers at the Netherlands’ University of Twente examined Italy’s Piracy Shield and concluded that at least “hundreds of legitimate websites [were] unknowingly affected by blocking.” Cloudflare, meanwhile, has been contesting an Italian fine imposed after it declined to block sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, describing Piracy Shield as “a misguided Italian regulatory scheme designed to protect large rightsholder interests at the expense of the broader Internet.”
Spain’s track record was entered into the record in a letter to Issa signed by 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 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.
In its reaction to the bill this week, Public Knowledge warned that “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.”
Nor is anyone made whole afterward. Sites caught in the net would “have no remedy for the days or weeks (or more) of lost business that result from an overzealous blocking order,” according to Public Knowledge. “America’s small businesses cannot afford to be treated as ‘acceptable collateral damage’ for multibillion-dollar entertainment and sports industries.”
According to the Re:Create coalition, the legislation would write into law “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,” and added 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.”
Attempt number three in 20 months
Nothing about Issa’s proposal makes it a partisan one-off. It is the latest in a string of bills from both parties, each chasing the same thing the Motion Picture Association has been lobbying for.
January 2025 brought the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act from Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.). In July 2025, two Democratic and two Republican senators rolled out the Block Bad Electronic Art and Recording Distributors Act.
“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.) described the measure as “a smart, targeted tool to stop these criminal operations at the source without infringing on legitimate speech or due process.”
The MPA stepped up its push in April 2024, when CEO Charles Rivkin announced the association would “work with members of Congress” on a requirement that ISPs block piracy sites. Its submission for Issa’s June 2026 hearing noted “more than fifty countries around the world” with blocking regimes in place. “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.”
That is three bills, zero laws, and a lobbying effort that keeps recruiting sponsors from both parties. For anyone operating a public DNS resolver or a VPN with upwards of 100,000 US subscribers, the figure worth tracking isn’t whether this specific bill clears Congress. It’s how many more arrive before one finally does.