The Cost of Website-Blocking: A Debate That Deserves Disentangling
On April 14, 2026, the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) will present a new expert report examining something that sounds technical but carries profound implications: the benefits and costs of website-blocking legislation across the EU-27. The study promises to assess whether these measures are effective, proportionate and compatible with EU law and broader competitiveness objectives.
Here's the thing: this debate generates enormous heat precisely because participants are often arguing about different things while using the same words. When someone says website blocking works, they might mean it reduces traffic to specific infringing sites. When someone else says website blocking doesn't work, they might mean it fails to reduce overall piracy rates. Both could be correct. Until the conversation disaggregates these claims, it remains stuck.
What Kind of Disagreement Is This?
The website-blocking debate is simultaneously a facts disagreement, a values disagreement, and an incentives disagreement – which is why it feels so intractable.
The facts disagreement concerns effectiveness. Research from Macquarie University examining Southeast Asian jurisdictions found that swift, systematic website blocking – exemplified by Indonesia – serves as an effective cybersecurity control, significantly reducing access to infringing content while redirecting traffic toward legitimate platforms. However, the same study noted that jurisdictions with procedural delays and inconsistent enforcement demonstrate limited efficacy. So does blocking work? The honest answer is: it depends on implementation speed, consistency, and what outcome you're measuring.
The values disagreement concerns what rights take priority. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that site-blocking legislation would build an internet kill switch and that the First Amendment should not take a back seat because giant media companies want the ability to shut down websites faster. Meanwhile, rights holders argue that protecting creative work and the livelihoods it supports is itself a fundamental value. Neither side is being dishonest about their priorities – they genuinely weight these values differently.
The incentives disagreement concerns who bears costs and who captures benefits. Internet service providers face compliance costs. Content creators face piracy losses. Users face access restrictions. Governments face enforcement burdens. Each stakeholder has legitimate reasons to emphasize the costs they bear and minimize the costs they impose on others.
The Strongest Version of Each Position
The case for website blocking, stated in its strongest form, runs something like this: Copyright infringement causes real economic harm to creators and the industries that support them. Blocking measures, when implemented swiftly and systematically, demonstrably reduce traffic to infringing sites. While circumvention is possible, it introduces friction that redirects casual infringers toward legitimate platforms. The alternative – doing nothing – effectively abandons the principle that creative work deserves protection.
The case against website blocking, stated in its strongest form, runs something like this: Blocking is technically blunt and easily circumvented by determined users. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute notes, what if a website has both infringing and non-infringing content, as many websites with infringing content do? Or what if a legitimate website is mistakenly subject to a blocking order? Over-blocking harms innocent parties. The infrastructure created for copyright enforcement can be repurposed for broader censorship. And the entertainment industry is, by many measures, thriving – suggesting the piracy problem may be overstated.
Both positions contain genuine insights. The question is whether they can be reconciled or whether they represent fundamentally incompatible visions of how the internet should work.
The Hidden Costs That Rarely Get Named
Statista's analysis of internet blocking costs focuses primarily on authoritarian shutdowns – Russia's post-invasion restrictions cost an estimated $21 billion in 2022 alone. But the methodology illuminates something important: blocking has economic costs that extend far beyond the immediate target.
A July 2025 report by Analysys Mason, sponsored by Cloudflare, argued that network blocking disrupts the technical infrastructure of the Internet, without removing infringing content and risks undermining the technical fabric of the global Internet, causing a range of economic harms. The report recommended that policymakers properly consider and assess the trade-off between the harms they are seeking to prevent through network blocking and the potential costs of coarsely implemented blocking.
Critics of this report – and there are many – note that Cloudflare has obvious commercial interests in opposing blocking measures. This is true. It's also true that rights holders have obvious commercial interests in supporting them. The presence of interests doesn't invalidate arguments, but it does mean every claim deserves scrutiny.
Where the Debate Breaks Down
The CEPS study promises to examine the technological limits of blocking, the ease of circumvention and the broader political economy of copyright enforcement. This framing is useful because it acknowledges that the debate isn't purely technical.
Consider the circumvention question. VPNs (Virtual Private Networks, tools that route internet traffic through encrypted tunnels) make blocking trivially easy to bypass for motivated users. Does this mean blocking is pointless? Not necessarily – if the goal is to redirect casual users toward legitimate platforms, friction matters even if it's not absolute. But if the goal is to eliminate access to infringing content entirely, blocking will always fail.
The question worth asking: what is the actual policy objective? Reducing casual infringement? Protecting specific revenue streams? Establishing a principle that infringement has consequences? Demonstrating political responsiveness to industry lobbying? These are different goals with different implications for policy design.
The Single Market Dimension
The CEPS event description mentions fragmentation of the Single Market as a potential cost of blocking measures. This deserves more attention than it typically receives.
If different Member States implement different blocking regimes with different procedures and different standards, the result is a patchwork that undermines the Digital Single Market's core promise. A service legal in one jurisdiction might be blocked in another. Compliance costs multiply. Legal uncertainty increases.
The strongest argument for EU-level coordination on blocking – whether to expand it or constrain it – is that fragmentation serves no one well. The question is what coordinated approach would look like and who would bear its costs.
What Would Have to Be True
For blocking advocates to be right, it would have to be true that: blocking measures can be implemented with sufficient precision to avoid significant over-blocking; the compliance costs imposed on service providers are proportionate to the harms prevented; circumvention rates remain low enough that blocking meaningfully affects overall infringement; and the infrastructure created won't be misused for broader censorship.
For blocking critics to be right, it would have to be true that: over-blocking is inherent to the technology and cannot be adequately mitigated; circumvention is easy enough that blocking primarily harms legitimate users while failing to deter infringers; the economic costs to the broader internet ecosystem outweigh the benefits to rights holders; and the censorship risks are substantial and not merely theoretical.
The CEPS study may provide evidence relevant to these empirical questions. What it cannot resolve is the underlying values disagreement about which rights take priority when they conflict.
The Question That Changes the Room
Perhaps the most productive question isn't does website blocking work? but rather what problem are we actually trying to solve, and is blocking the most proportionate tool for solving it?
If the problem is that creators aren't adequately compensated for their work, blocking is one tool among many – and perhaps not the most effective. If the problem is that specific bad actors are profiting from infringement, targeted enforcement might work better than infrastructure-level blocking. If the problem is that legitimate platforms can't compete with free infringing alternatives, the answer might involve making legitimate access easier and more affordable.
The April 14 CEPS event will bring together policymakers, academics, and stakeholders to discuss these questions. The study's findings will matter less than whether participants can move beyond position-defending toward genuine problem-solving.
These are precisely the kinds of debates that benefit from being held in rooms where disagreement is productive rather than performative. Human x AI Europe, taking place May 19 in Vienna, is designed for exactly this purpose – bringing together people who care about getting digital governance right, even when they disagree about what right means. If the intersection of technology policy, fundamental rights, and European competitiveness matters to you, that's a room worth being in.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is website blocking in the context of EU copyright enforcement?
A: Website blocking refers to measures that prevent internet users from accessing specific websites, typically implemented at the network level by requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to URLs or domains associated with copyright infringement or other illegal content.
Q: When is the CEPS report on website blocking being released?
A: The CEPS expert report "Benefits and costs of website-blocking legislation: an economic, legal and policy assessment" will be presented at a hybrid event on April 14, 2026, at 15:00-16:30 CET in Brussels.
Q: How effective is website blocking at reducing piracy?
A: Effectiveness varies significantly by implementation. Research from Macquarie University found that swift, systematic blocking (as in Indonesia) significantly reduces access to infringing content, while jurisdictions with procedural delays show limited efficacy. Circumvention via VPNs remains easy for motivated users.
Q: What are the main arguments against website blocking legislation?
A: Critics argue that blocking causes over-blocking of legitimate content, imposes compliance costs on service providers, fragments the Digital Single Market, creates infrastructure that could enable broader censorship, and is easily circumvented by users willing to use VPNs or change DNS settings.
Q: What economic costs are associated with internet blocking measures?
A: According to Analysys Mason's 2025 report, network blocking can disrupt legitimate internet services unrelated to targeted content, impose compliance costs on providers, and undermine the technical fabric of the global internet. Statista estimated Russia's 2022 internet restrictions cost $21 billion.
Q: Who funded the CEPS study on website blocking?
A: The study was supported by Nord Security. CEPS states that "as with all CEPS research, the analysis and conclusions are entirely independent and reflect the views of the authors alone."