The instinct behind France's anti-piracy escalation is defensible, and it deserves to be stated fairly before it is contested. Live sports rights are expensive; illegal IPTV streams siphon real revenue — ARCOM, the French audiovisual and digital regulator, estimates the direct loss from illegal sports broadcasts at €290 million in 2024. A court order against a single internet service provider is trivially defeated by switching to a third-party DNS resolver or a VPN. If site-blocking law is to mean anything, the argument runs, enforcement has to follow infringers up the stack. That is the strongest case for what ARCOM did on May 22, 2026, and it is not a frivolous one.
But what ARCOM published is not another targeted order. It is the connective tissue for an automated administrative blocking system that now spans the entire delivery chain.
From court orders to a central list with a plug-in contract
French site-blocking traditionally ran through judges: a rights holder such as Canal+ or the Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP) wins an order under Article L.333-10 of the Sports Code, and ISPs comply. The novelty is architectural. ARCOM has built a centralised scheme that lists every domain subject to a blocking or delisting demand, and it is now inviting search engines, alternative DNS resolvers, and VPN providers to connect to that list through an “interface contract” describing the technical hookup (ARCOM press release, 22 May 2026).
The scale is already substantial. ARCOM reports that in 2025, 81% of blocking requests sent to ISPs were also pushed to alternative DNS resolvers — 5,263 notified requests — and that 1,845 services were delisted from search engines out of 6,496 blocked. Following the first French court rulings against VPN operators in May 2025, ARCOM has demanded the blocking of 598 domain names by VPN providers (Broadband TV News). The May 2025 Paris ruling was itself a milestone: it was the first to label VPNs “technical intermediaries” and conscript them into copyright enforcement.
The real concern is the next step, not this one
What makes the May 22 guidance worth flagging is where it points. ARCOM has said its automated, real-time pirate IPTV blocking system should be operational no later than the end of the first half of 2026, modelled on systems in the UK and Italy, and designed to scale from “a few hundred requests per week” to “thousands” (TorrentFreak). Crucially, the current requirement that each domain be verified before it is blocked would be dropped in favour of ARCOM monitoring rights holders' own detection systems and the general quality of complaints.
That is the pivot from adjudication to automation. A judge verifying each domain is replaced by a private rights holder's machine-generated detection feed flowing into a national block list that intermediaries are pre-wired to honour. At a few hundred orders a year, errors are visible and contestable. At thousands of automated requests a week, due process becomes a rounding error. Over-blocking stops being an exception and becomes a statistical certainty.
Collateral damage is already on the record
This is not a hypothetical. When a 2024 court ordered Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to poison DNS records for Canal+, Cisco withdrew its OpenDNS resolver from the entire country rather than comply, leaving French users without a widely used privacy and security service from 28 June 2024 (TorrentFreak). Italy's Piracy Shield — the explicit template — has repeatedly knocked legitimate services offline, including incidents affecting Google Drive and Cloudflare-hosted sites, when overbroad IP blocks swept up shared infrastructure. DNS resolvers and VPNs are general-purpose tools for security, privacy, and censorship circumvention; degrading them to chase football streams imposes costs on millions of lawful users and fragments the open internet that French firms also depend on.
Infrastructure outlasts its rationale
The deeper objection is institutional. Once a country has a centralised, automated, multi-layer block list with intermediaries contractually plugged in, the marginal cost of adding a new category of “undesirable” content — gambling, “fake news,” terrorist material, politically inconvenient sites — falls to almost nothing. France's own record counsels caution: digital-rights group La Quadrature du Net has documented how terrorist-content takedown powers were used to censor political speech, and the government's 2024 emergency block of TikTok in New Caledonia drew a legal challenge over censorship without adequate judicial oversight. Plumbing built for copyright rarely stays limited to copyright.
A proportionate path exists
None of this means rights holders should be defenceless. Proportionate enforcement is available: keep blocking orders judicial and case-by-case rather than administratively automated; require independent verification before a domain joins the list; mandate sunset and review so stale domains are purged; publish transparency reports on what is blocked and why; and prioritise following the money to the operators and payment rails behind commercial piracy rather than recruiting the entire infrastructure stack. ARCOM's own data shows piracy audiences already falling — a 34% decline since 2021 (ARCOM 2025 piracy report). That progress is an argument for restraint, not for building a permanent administrative shutdown pipeline whose reach will be measured in thousands of automated orders a week.