On June 11, 2026—the opening day of the FIFA World Cup—France's audiovisual regulator ARCOM put a new piece of enforcement machinery into the field. Rather than blocking pirate domain names, the tool blacks out the IP addresses carrying illegal streams in real time, for the duration of a match. As ARCOM deputy director Pauline Combredet-Blassel put it to French media, viewers of pirated feeds "could find their screens go black at the moment of a penalty" (OneFootball). The system was first trialled during Roland Garros, where it disrupted roughly a dozen viewers; Ligue 1 plans to begin IP-targeting from August.
This is a meaningful escalation in how a European regulator enforces copyright online, and it deserves scrutiny on its own terms—not as a culture-war proxy, but as a question of whether the mechanism is proportionate to the harm.
What ARCOM actually switched on
The operational model is fast by design. Rights holders detect a pirate stream, report it to ARCOM, and the regulator orders France's four main ISPs—Orange, SFR, Bouygues Télécom and Free—to block the offending IP address immediately, with the block lifted when the match ends. ARCOM has signalled it wants the process fully automated by the end of the first half of 2026, shifting its own role from manually verifying each request to auditing the quality of rights holders' detection systems (TorrentFreak). Today IP blocking handles a few hundred requests a week; automation is meant to push that into the thousands.
The economic motivation is real, not invented. ARCOM estimates the direct loss from illegally broadcast sport in France at €290 million in 2024, before lost tax and social-security revenue (ARCOM). Roughly 12% of football viewers in France watch through illegal services, and the figure for Ligue 1 specifically is reported far higher (Connexion France). beIN Sports, which holds exclusive pay rights to 50 World Cup matches (with 54 more free-to-air), is the most direct commercial beneficiary of stopping the leakage.
The legal engine sidelines the regulator
The framework comes from a cross-party Senate bill on the organisation, governance and financing of professional sport, adopted by the Sénat on June 10, 2025 and now before the Assemblée nationale, with debate scheduled for late June 2026 (Sénat). It amends Article L.333-10 of the Sports Code to enable "real-time blocking during the live broadcast of a sporting event," and—notably—creates new offences aimed at illicit services and those who commercialise them, not at end users.
That last point is the bill's best feature, and we should say so plainly: France is not criminalising the teenager watching a stream. Two further design choices also count in its favour. Blocks are tied to the duration of a single match, and the protocol includes a list of "untouchable" IP addresses meant to shield critical infrastructure. Compared with permanent, open-ended takedowns, time-boxing is the more speech-protective option.
The case for moving fast
The strongest argument for ARCOM's approach is that domain blocking has genuinely failed against modern IPTV piracy. Pirate operators rotate domains and DNS providers within minutes, and the manual, court-mediated process that takes several working days is hopeless against a stream that exists only for the 90 minutes of a match. If the law is going to protect broadcast rights at all, enforcement has to operate on the same clock as the infringement. Targeting the source server's IP, rather than chasing disposable domains, is the technically coherent response to that problem.
Why IP blocking is the wrong default
Here is the problem the €290 million figure cannot answer: IP addresses are not websites. As Cloudflare documented in appealing a €14 million fine over Italy's "Piracy Shield," IP addresses are "regularly and necessarily shared by thousands of websites," creating "an unavoidable risk of overblocking innocent websites" (Cloudflare). Italy's system is the cautionary tale France is one bad protocol away from repeating: it knocked out Google Drive for Italian users for over 12 hours, blocked Ukrainian government and educational sites, and—per a September 2025 University of Twente study—routinely left legitimate sites dark for months.
France's safeguards are real but unproven at World Cup scale. A "dozen viewers" blocked at Roland Garros tells us almost nothing about what happens when thousands of automated IP blocks fire during a tournament watched by tens of millions, against pirates who deliberately co-locate behind the same cloud IPs as legitimate services. The whole point of using a shared CDN is that blocking it hurts everyone on it. An "untouchable" allow-list only protects infrastructure ARCOM thought to list in advance.
The deeper concern is institutional. The 2025 bill lets rights holders push identifications to ISPs and bypass prior review by ARCOM, the independent authority. Speed is bought by removing the neutral check between a commercial claimant and a live block on internet traffic. That is precisely the design flaw—private actors triggering blocks with thin oversight—that turned Piracy Shield into a censorship liability.
A proportionate path
None of this means France should tolerate industrial-scale piracy. It means the burden is on ARCOM to prove the mechanism is surgical before it scales. Three things would make the difference: mandatory public logging of every blocked IP and its duration; a fast, funded channel for wrongly-blocked sites to get un-blocked within minutes, not months; and a hard preference for URL- or server-level targeting over raw IP blocks wherever a shared address is in play. Get those right and France has a model. Skip them, and the screen that goes black at the moment of a penalty may belong to someone who was never watching the match at all.