The Assemblée Nationale passed a sports governance bill on June 29, 2026 by a margin of 75 votes to 2, advancing a measure that lets France's audiovisual regulator, Arcom, order fully automated, real-time IP-address blocking of pirate IPTV streams during live sporting events — without a court authorizing each block as it happens. A joint Senate-Assembly committee (commission mixte paritaire) reached a compromise text on July 8, 2026, and definitive votes are scheduled for July 20-21 in the Senate and Assembly respectively, meaning the law could be finalized within two weeks.
From Judge-Supervised Lists to Automated Blocking
France already has a piracy-blocking regime: Article L.333-10 of the Code du sport, introduced by the law of October 25, 2021, created "dynamic injunctions." A judge issues an initial order naming pirate sites and requiring intermediaries to block them for the duration of a competition (capped at 12 months); Arcom then administratively adds newly discovered pirate sites to that list without returning to court. Arcom's own May 6, 2026 recommendation shows how far this has already scaled: court-ordered de-referencing measures roughly doubled between 2024 and 2025, and rights holders sent over 5,000 blocking requests to alternative DNS providers in 2025 alone, now formalized through Arcom-drafted template agreements with search engines, DNS resolvers and VPN providers.
The new bill goes further on two fronts: it hands Arcom a direct power to levy financial sanctions, and it authorizes automated, real-time blocking during a live broadcast — removing the manual verification step by sworn Arcom agents that the current system requires before an IP is cut.
Why Live Sport Is a Genuinely Hard Case
The strongest argument for this system is one the streaming industry rarely gets to make so cleanly: live sport is the one category of content where after-the-fact enforcement is close to worthless. A pirated stream of a World Cup match is worth nothing the moment the final whistle blows, while a notice-and-takedown process that takes days is built for content whose value persists. Domain and DNS blocking, meanwhile, is trivially evaded — pirate operators simply migrate to a new domain within minutes. Targeting the server-side IP address directly, as Arcom tested at Roland Garros between May 18 and the final in early June 2026, at least forces pirates to rebuild infrastructure rather than just re-point a domain. Arcom reported the pilot blocked roughly a dozen pirate streams, using safeguards including a whitelist of protected IPs and blocking windows confined strictly to match duration.
For the 2026 World Cup, which began June 11, that framework scaled up under a June 3, 2026 judgment from the Paris tribunal judiciaire, implemented through voluntary agreements with France's four major ISPs — Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Free — reportedly able to act on up to 10,000 IP addresses at once. That figure matches the scale of Spain's comparable regime, which France's bill explicitly draws on alongside Italian and British models, and underscores the genuine size of the piracy problem: Arcom estimates sports piracy costs French sport roughly €290 million a year.
Where Automation Outruns Its Own Safeguards
"The risk is a black screen during penalty shootouts."
That is Arcom deputy director-general Pauline Combredet-Blassel's own framing of the trade-off, and it is worth taking at face value. The current dynamic-injunction system works precisely because a judge fixes the initial scope and Arcom's role is limited to extending an already-adjudicated list. Removing sworn-agent verification and compressing the loop to real-time necessarily forecloses any adversarial check on individual blocking decisions made mid-match — there is no practical way to contest a wrongly blocked IP before the game that IP was blocked for has ended. Shared hosting and CDN infrastructure make overblocking a real risk, not a hypothetical one, which is presumably why the pilot needed an explicit whitelist of protected addresses in the first place. Notably, Ligue 1 itself has criticized the framework as lacking "concrete measures" — a reminder that the loudest voices in this debate are rights holders arguing the regime doesn't go far enough, which should make legislators more careful about civil-liberties guardrails, not less.
The Proportionate Path
Given the genuine, time-decaying harm live-sport piracy causes, some form of expedited blocking is defensible — France's existing judge-then-Arcom model was already a reasonable compromise. But collapsing judicial pre-approval entirely, even for a narrow class of live events, sets a precedent that a regulator can order infrastructure-level blocking on its own initiative in real time. That template rarely stays narrow once built: the same automated pipeline built for World Cup penalty shootouts is available for the next content category a future government decides is urgent enough to skip the judge. Lawmakers finalizing this text on July 20-21 should keep the automation but preserve a fast, genuine post-hoc judicial review mechanism — logging every automated block for retrospective court audit — rather than treating speed and due process as mutually exclusive.