What Google Actually Told the EU About Site Blocking
Piracy site blocking in the European Union has mostly meant ordering internet providers to stop resolving specific domains. Google wants to keep it that way, and it told the European Commission so directly in a submission most readers will never see, because it sits inside a 21-page PDF attached to a public consultation record rather than a press release.
- Feedback window
- 13 May to 25 Jun 2026
- Total submissions
- 432
- Google reference
- F33504634
- Filed
- 25 Jun 2026
The consultation
The submission responds to a specific, findable European Commission proceeding: a call for evidence for an impact assessment tied to the review of the 2019 Copyright Directive. The Commission opened the feedback window on 13 May 2026 and closed it on 25 June 2026, publishing all 432 responses on its Have Your Say portal. Submissions came from collecting societies, publishers, sports federations, AI companies including Anthropic, and tech platforms including Google. Each submission carries a feedback reference number and is downloadable as filed.
What Google actually filed
Google's public-facing comment on the portal is a single line pointing to an attachment: "Please find Google's feedback attached." The substance is in that attachment, filed under organisation Google, organisation size "Large (250 or more)", transparency register number 03181945560-59. The filing addresses site blocking as one part of a broader copyright submission, and its core argument is about scope, not principle. Google does not tell the Commission that site blocking should not exist. It tells the Commission that blocking measures currently reach past their target.
The distinction the submission draws is between blocking a specific infringing page and blocking shared infrastructure that many unrelated services depend on. DNS resolvers, VPN providers, and IP addresses hosting multiple customers fall into the second category. An order that blocks a DNS resolver or an IP address does not remove the infringing content; it removes access to everything else riding the same resolver or address, while a user can switch to an alternative resolver in minutes. Google's position is that this makes such orders both disproportionate and largely ineffective as anti-piracy tools.
What Google is asking for
The submission sets out guardrails rather than a blanket objection. It asks that blocking orders be limited to specific infringing content rather than entire domains or shared infrastructure, that courts review each blocking request individually instead of approving them as a formality, that orders include an end date rather than running indefinitely, and that the costs of implementing a block be shared between rightsholders and the intermediary carrying it out. Google frames blocking as a measure that should only follow a failed takedown request, not a first response.
None of this is new territory for the company. Google has separately opposed expanding blocking to cover DNS resolvers and VPNs in other jurisdictions, and its EU filing draws on the same reasoning: that measures aimed at pirate sites tend to catch legitimate traffic sharing the same technical resources, and that the harm from overblocking is harder to reverse than the harm from underblocking.
What this is not
A single company's consultation response is not EU policy, and the Commission is not obligated to adopt any position argued in a feedback submission. The 432 responses to this call for evidence will feed into an impact assessment, which is itself a preliminary step before any legislative proposal. Site blocking rules in specific EU member states, including France, Italy, Belgium, and Portugal, already exist under national law and are not directly altered by this consultation. What the submission does establish is Google's own filed position, on the record, ahead of whatever the Commission proposes next.
Status
Filed 25 June 2026, published on the Commission's portal, current as of 6 August 2026. No legislative text has been proposed from this call for evidence yet.
A ban on shared-infrastructure blocking does not touch the parts of a network setup a user controls directly. For how that overlaps with resolver choice, see the private DNS setup guide.
Sources
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the EU copyright review that Google submitted feedback to?
The European Commission opened a call for evidence for an impact assessment on the review of the 2019 Copyright Directive. The feedback window ran from 13 May to 25 June 2026 and drew 432 public submissions.
What did Google actually ask the European Commission to do?
Google asked the Commission to keep any expanded site-blocking regime narrow: block specific infringing pages rather than shared infrastructure, treat blocking as a last resort after takedown requests, require courts to review each order rather than approve it automatically, and exclude DNS resolvers, VPNs, and shared IP addresses from blocking scope.
Is Google opposed to all site blocking in the EU?
No. Google’s submission does not argue against targeted, proportionate blocking measures with judicial oversight and time limits. Its objection is to blocking that reaches infrastructure shared by unrelated services, such as DNS resolvers and VPN providers.
Where can I read the submission itself?
The European Commission publishes the full submission on its Have Your Say portal under feedback reference F33504634, alongside the other 431 responses to the same call for evidence.