CCIA warns on World Cup anti-piracy measures
June 11, 2026

By Colin Mann



As the football World Cup kicks off, EU and national policymakers should rein in automated web-blocking systems that allow private parties to restrict access to online services without proper judicial oversight, warns trade body the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA Europe).

It contends that these anti-piracy systems rely on blunt blocking of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and the Domain Name System (DNS), thereby undermining the Digital Services Act (DSA), disrupting lawful services, and infringing Europeans’ fundamental rights despite limited effectiveness.


To mark the tournament’s start, CCIA Europe is launching a new explainer (Fighting Piracy Without Breaking the Internet) that details these risks, explaining why it thinks that infrastructure-level blocking is a crude, disproportionate response to illegal sports streaming – concerns which it suggests are further substantiated by recent independent academic research.

Recent anti-piracy plans announced by UEFA ahead of the World Cup, which seek to combine deeper online monitoring with dynamic blocking, risk scaling up the most problematic elements of national experiments already backfiring in France, Italy, and Spain, warns the CCIA.

It notes that in Spain, LaLiga uses a single limited court order to justify aggressive general IP-address blocking, according to the CCIA, with little transparency and no redress for wrongly blocked services.

It also suggests that Italy’s automated Piracy Shield has repeatedly caused serious collateral damage. France, meanwhile, has expanded blocking obligations beyond internet providers to DNS resolvers, content delivery networks (CDNs), proxy services, and virtual private networks (VPNs).

According to the CCIA, the result is widespread overblocking that routinely takes lawful businesses, educational platforms, public services, and cloud-hosted tools offline, according to the CCIA. It also pressures neutral intermediaries, including VPNs and CDNs, to take actions that are technically unworkable, legally questionable, or incompatible with their role in keeping the internet open and secure.

“Scaling these tactics across Europe during the World Cup would normalise privatised online censorship,” it argues.

Accordingly, CCIA Europe urges policymakers to defend the rule of law and the DSA by ensuring that no private organisation can block content without meaningful court scrutiny.

CCIA Europe’s Intellectual Property and Audiovisual Policy Manager, Charlotte Dantin, said: “Major sporting events must not become a testing ground for private, automated censorship of internet infrastructure. Illegal streaming can and should be addressed, but enforcement must remain lawful, proportionate, and subject to independent judicial oversight.”

“The mistakes already visible in national blocking experiments should not be allowed to proliferate across the EU. When IP addresses are added to opaque blocking lists without continuous court review or meaningful redress, innocent businesses and users suffer. Piracy enforcement must target pirates, not the basic infrastructure that underpins the internet,” she concluded.