The current landscape: A broken sports market
In the UK, Italy, Spain, and France, the unauthorized streaming of live sports is continuing to grow, and while regulators and rights holders seem to believe otherwise, this isn't just about people wanting free content. The user experience for legitimate sports fans became abysmal — let’s just take football as an example. To follow a single league, a fan often requires two or three distinct subscriptions (e.g., Sky, TNT, and Amazon Prime in the UK or DAZN and Sky in Italy), costing upwards of €60 to €100 per month. Even then, archaic "blackout" rules often prevent fans from watching widely advertised local matches live.
The market has failed to deliver a cohesive product. In response, many Europeans have turned to IPTV services and unauthorized streams, which offer what the big broadcasters won't — every match, on one platform, for a fraction of the price.
Targeting neutral services
Instead of addressing this core market failure, European regulators and rights holders have launched an unprecedented crackdown on the infrastructure of the internet itself. Having realized that blocking individual websites is burdensome, they have shifted their focus to the neutral providers of DNS, CDN, and VPN services. However, the easiest way isn’t necessarily the right way to deal with piracy. Attacking neutral intermediaries benefits only rights holders, incurs no costs to them, and leads to collateral damage that has to be borne by the entire internet ecosystem.
We are seeing such coordinated legislative and judicial offensive across major European markets:
- Italy: The Piracy Shield system, in place since 2024, has pushed enforcement into new territory. It allows AGCOM to issue near-instant blocking orders without prior judicial review. This enforcement has expanded beyond traditional ISPs to encompass DNS, CDN, and VPN providers as “obliged intermediaries.” Just recently it was underscored by a multimillion-euro fine against Cloudflare for refusing to implement mandated blocks via its public DNS service.
- Spain: Rights holders like LaLiga have pursued some of the most assertive and ill-prepared anti-piracy actions in Europe. Spanish courts have granted targeted orders against telecom providers enabling the blocking of IP addresses and domains allegedly used for unauthorized football streaming, and enforcement has at times swept up unrelated internet traffic. LaLiga’s legal strategy has also explicitly targeted infrastructure providers, including CDN and VPN service components — it has argued that their technology enables piracy and pressed for broader intermediary obligations.
- France: Rights holders have frequently utilized dynamic injunctions to force DNS resolvers to block mirror sites during live match windows. In 2025, French courts began issuing orders specifically targeting VPN providers, demanding they prevent access to infringing indexes, which is overseen by the local audiovisual and digital communications body ARCOM.
- The UK: The Premier League continues to rely on "super block" high court injunctions. While traditionally targeting ISPs, the scope is creeping toward including other intermediary services down the chain.
Why blocking by VPNs is fundamentally flawed
Regulators are demanding that VPNs become the internet's gatekeepers. However, from a network engineering perspective, this request is fundamentally flawed. While a VPN can technically apply a firewall rule to drop packets destined for a specific IP, doing so effectively without destroying the service is nearly impossible due to CDNs and encryption.
First is the CDN problem. Many modern pirate operations do not host streams on a single server in a basement — they use content delivery networks (CDNs). These services optimize speed by serving content from thousands of edge servers and, crucially, use shared IP addresses. A single IP address might host a pirate stream alongside a hospital portal, a banking API, and a small business website. If a VPN provider complies with a court order to "block IP address X," they don't just block the pirate stream, they block every legitimate service sharing that IP. That’s not to mention that IP blocking creates significant operational overhead for services forced to implement it. They must constantly update and remove entries once IPs become obsolete or reassigned. However, intermediaries such as VPN providers are not in a position to perform this ongoing validation themselves and must instead rely on blocking lists submitted by rights holders, which has already caused overblocking in Italy and Spain. VPNs cannot engage in this scorched-earth blocking without rendering their service unreliable for legitimate work.
Then we have an encryption bypass. Even if regulators provide a list of domain names (e.g., watch-football-free.com) rather than IPs, modern encryption renders VPNs blind. VPNs usually filter domains via their own DNS resolvers. However, users can now easily enable legitimate security and privacy features, like DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), in their browsers.
- DoH creates an encrypted tunnel inside the VPN connection, routing DNS requests directly to a third party (like Quad9) rather than the VPN’s resolver.
- ECH encrypts the handshake with the server, hiding the hostname.
In this scenario, the VPN acts as a “dumb pipe.” It sees encrypted traffic entering and encrypted traffic exiting, but it cannot see the domain the user is requesting and therefore cannot reliably block it.
Piracy is a service, not a policing problem
Even if we ignore the technical impossibilities, even if governments could magically block every pirate site, piracy would not disappear. It would simply migrate to the next technology (e.g., decentralized mesh networks) because piracy is a service problem.
This is not a hypothesis — it is a fact backed by different researchers and historical data.
In the early 2000s, no amount of lawsuits against Napster or Limewire stopped music piracy. What did? Spotify. Music piracy was virtually eliminated not by enforcement, but by convenience. Spotify offered a centralized library, instant access, and a fair price. It became easier to pay €10/month than to pirate. The "service gap" closed.
We saw the same with video. Between 2012 and 2018, when Netflix was the dominant aggregator, BitTorrent traffic for movies and TV shows plummeted. People were willing to pay because the service was convenient. However, as the market fragmented into Disney+, Max, Paramount+, Peacock, and endless others, piracy saw a resurgence. Consumers are fatigued by managing six different subscriptions and apps. They are returning to piracy because the "illegal" aggregators now offer a better user experience than the legal fragmentation.
Sports streaming is currently in the "pre-Spotify" era — expensive, fragmented, and user hostile.
The current European strategy of turning VPNs into border guards is a dangerous distraction. It undermines internet neutrality, threatens privacy technologies that businesses rely on, and creates massive collateral damage, all without solving the root issue.
As long as a sports fan in Madrid, London, or Rome has to jump through expensive loops to watch their team play, they will find a workaround.
The solution lies in the way content is accessed, not network filtering.
- 1.End the exclusivity silos: Rights holders must move toward non-exclusive licensing or cross-platform aggregation, allowing users to access content through a single interface.
- 2.Abolish blackouts: Artificial scarcity (like the UK's 3 p.m. blackout) has no place in a global digital economy — it actively incentivizes the use of foreign unauthorized streams.
- 3.Harmonize pricing: A pan-European digital single market for content would eliminate the arbitrage that drives users to piracy.
We believe there are cases where blocking does help, such as for malware, trackers, malicious actors, or snoopers. However, we cannot block our way to a better business model. It is time to stop fighting the technology and start fixing the service.
