A new bipartisan bill introduced in the US Congress on 28th September would give courts the power to order internet service providers and major DNS resolvers to block foreign piracy websites, while explicitly leaving VPN providers out of the blocking regime, as first reported by TechRadar.
The Deterring Extraterritorial Foreign Exploitation of Networks Damaging Intellectual Property Act, known as the DEFEND IP Act, was put forward by Senators Chris Coons, Thom Tillis, Marsha Blackburn and Adam Schiff, alongside companion legislation in the House from Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Ben Cline.
It merges two earlier, competing proposals, Lofgren’s Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act and Tillis’s Block BEARD bill, into a single piece of legislation.
Under the bill, copyright holders could ask a federal court to designate a foreign website as a “piracy site” if it exists primarily to enable infringement with no significant legitimate use.
Once a site has that designation, rights holders can apply for a separate blocking order, which courts can only grant if blocking is judged “technically feasible and effective”.
Site operators get 20 days to respond before an order is made, though courts retain the ability to issue orders without that notice in some circumstances. Any resulting order lasts a year and can be renewed.
The blocking duty itself would fall on broadband providers with at least 50,000 subscribers and on public DNS resolvers with more than 100 million dollars in annual revenue, a threshold that in practice points at firms such as Google and Cloudflare.
Crucially, the bill’s text excludes “an entity that exclusively provides virtual private network services or similar service that encrypt and route user traffic through intermediary servers”, meaning VPN companies would not be required to block the designated sites on their own networks.
That exemption sets the DEFEND IP Act apart from a rival measure, the American Copyright Protection Act, introduced in Congress roughly a week earlier, which would have applied blocking obligations to VPNs as well as ISPs and DNS services.
Digital rights group Public Knowledge has criticised both bills, warning that applying blocking orders to global DNS resolvers in particular risks blocking access for users well outside the US, not just the intended American audience, and has described the approach as building “expansive infrastructure for censorship”.
For UK readers, the bill carries no direct legal force, since it would only touch US-based infrastructure. But it is still worth watching.
The UK’s courts have handed down their own site-blocking orders against piracy and illegal IPTV services for years, usually directed at ISPs rather than VPN providers, and the Premier League’s long-running campaign against illegal streaming shows how that kind of order can work in practice.
Whatever version of a US site-blocking law eventually passes, assuming either does before the current congressional term ends in January 2027, will likely influence how other governments frame similar rules, and how VPN providers respond to them.
For VPN users generally, the episode is a reminder that a provider’s legal footing can shift with legislation that has nothing to do with its own policies.
Anyone picking a VPN for streaming or everyday privacy should favour a provider with a track record of resisting overreaching data requests and a transparent, independently audited no-logs policy. ExpressVPN has maintained that kind of track record through previous legal disputes in multiple jurisdictions.
Both the DEFEND IP Act and its rival remain early in the legislative process, with no committee markup yet scheduled for either. With several of the bills’ key sponsors due to leave Congress at the end of the term, their prospects for passage this year are far from certain.
