Congressman's parting gift: a site-blocking bill
Censorship blocking · 17.09.2026

Congressman Darrell Issa, who's leaving the House of Representatives in a few months, decided to leave America a farewell gift — a bill to block foreign pirate sites. He introduced it this week, just as he promised back in late June.

The gist is simple: rights holders get court orders for blocking, which are then sent to internet providers, domain name services, and even VPNs. So if a pirate site used to just get taken down over a DMCA complaint, now it can be shut off entirely — at the infrastructure level.

Issa's reasoning is downright poetic. At the hearings he asked: "Can we do this at the speed of sound? At the speed of light?" The point being that pirates can rip a 45-minute live sports broadcast apart faster than rights holders can write a complaint. Another nice touch — the claim that online piracy funds terrorist groups and other criminal networks. Bold, but as usual, not a single figure to back it up.

Issa is neither the first nor clearly the last — a whole line of Republicans and Democrats have already championed site-blocking, all generously backed by the Motion Picture Association. The industry has long dreamed of a kill switch it can flip without having to sue individual pirates in court.

Civil liberties advocates aren't thrilled. Meredith Rose of Public Knowledge calls it as it is: instead of suing the people actually running pirate sites abroad, Congress, at the film industry's urging, is building censorship infrastructure. And it doesn't just hit pirates — everyone from home ISPs to global DNS resolvers would be required to block, based on nothing more than a suspicion of copyright infringement.

A classic story: a problem with a specific target gets "solved" with a weapon of mass destruction. And ordinary sites mistakenly accused of piracy end up catching the blast too.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/republican-bill-would-order-isps-dns-providers-and-vpns-to-block-piracy-sites/