Google vs Europe: Here's Why the War on Piracy Scares Tech Giants

Google has filed with the European Commission a memorandum marked as "confidential and private," which eventually ended up online along with other contributions collected during the review of the Copyright Directive. The document arrives at a delicate moment for the company, which has already been forced to block pirate domains via its public DNS resolver in France, Belgium, Italy, and Portugal.

In the text, Google unequivocally rejects third-party DNS blocking, VPNs, and IP address measures, considering them disproportionate and easily circumvented. "Blocking DNS resolvers, IPs, and VPNs is ineffective because it does not remove content at all and can be easily evaded by using alternative DNS resolvers," the company writes. "It is disproportionate, affects legitimate services, raises issues of extraterritoriality, and ultimately blocks entire domains." The same applies to IP addresses, which are often shared by multiple legitimate services on the same host.

Google's Position on the Review of the European Copyright Directive

To support its stance, Google cites specific cases that have already occurred. In Italy, the Piracy Shield system mistakenly blocked a subdomain of Google Drive, as well as IP addresses hosting a total of 42 million Cloudflare client domains. In France, Cisco stopped offering the OpenDNS service after a local court ordered the blocking of DNS resolvers. In Portugal, in December 2019, telecom operators blocked some virtual IP addresses housed by Google, disrupting core services of the company and cutting off legitimate traffic from other Google Cloud customers sharing the same addresses.

To strengthen the case, there is a study by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), which after a blocking order to protect LaLiga in Spain found over 554,000 domains blocked at least once during game broadcasts. The affected sites include those of Amnesty International, ACLU, UNICEF, UNHCR, the Australian Senate, the Stanford Law Review, and even Amazon S3 endpoints.

Google does not call for a complete abolition of blocks but demands clear boundaries: courts, the company writes, should not merely act as a "mailbox" for rights holders, approving requests without real scrutiny. Measures should remain a last resort, after the failure of ordinary removal procedures, and should be transparent, time-limited, and have costs shared between rightsholders and intermediaries.

For Google, the real solution to piracy does not lie in enforcement but in legal offerings. "In our experience, unmet consumer demand is a key factor in piracy. Therefore, one of the best ways to combat it is to offer better, more convenient, and legal alternatives," the memorandum states.

The Big G has yet to publicly comment on U.S. plans, but it is a member of the Software and Information Industry Association, whose president Chris Mohr testified in the hearing describing the members as "genuinely divided" on the issue, while calling for solid judicial guarantees and precise technical measures to avoid indiscriminate blocking. The Internet Infrastructure Coalition, which represents among others Amazon, Cloudflare, and Google itself, has also already opposed blanket blocks with the campaign "DNS at Risk."