[arp242]

They're not a random 3rd uninvolved party "walking down the street"; they're directly involved in delivering the goods. They're also not being "retaliated" against; they're simply asked to stop assisting in providing the service to the (allegedly) illegal site. No one is being "bullied"; is the postal service being "bullied" when they're told to stop delivering meth over the post, or illegal firearms, or child pornography?

[hakfoo]

Actually, the Post Office has some very serious legal mandates about not being allowed to open and inspect mail. You're going to have to get court orders, and I'd expect a lot of courts would ask "If you know there's illegal stuff being mailed, wouldn't it be more efficient to cut it at the source rather than try to intercept it once it enters the mail stream?"

Demanding a general block-- "you can't deliver any mail from Bob Smith"-- would be overbroad and silly-- he might be shipping meth, but he also mailed his electric bill and Christmas cards, none of which contain meth.

Here, we have a very similar issue with DNS. The DNS provider can't meaningfully know the intent of a given query; the site in question could contain both pirated content and cat videos, and there is no way to know which is being requested.

I also can't imagine how you'd expect this to scale-- if one firm realizes they can demand one domain removed, it creates precedent where eventually every cloud service provider and ISP is buried under requests. Even assuming every one of those requests is 100% legitimate, good faith, and accurate, it's simply going to be an untenable task. Inevitably, it would go back to the courts because the finite resources of service providers can't keep up with the tsunami and something got through.

The only possible way to make the Copyright Brigade happy would be to switch to an allowlist model: only these domains explicitly blessed by the Almighty Sony are allowed to be routed.

[Tozen]

> They're not a random 3rd uninvolved party "walking down the street"; they're directly involved in delivering the goods.

That statement is false. DNS resolvers have nothing to do with piracy whatsoever nor are delivering any "goods". This is why the analogy of lashing out at 3rd parties is appropriate.

> They're also not being "retaliated" against; they're simply asked to stop assisting in providing the service to the (allegedly) illegal site.

Right now, it must be proven in court that the site is "illegal" and infringement occurred by specific persons. Not just make a claim to initiate world wide DNS censorship, where a company foolishly thinks such will help increase their profits (as various studies show it doesn't help). This attempt at bullying DNS providers can lead to general censorship by powerful companies and then government entities, once they can get the legal precedent set.

If people are fuzzy about what's going on, The Hill also did a good story about this. https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/594718-german-court-c...

The attempt at stealth pushing censorship over the web, is to have sites blocked that might contain infringing content without proving that is so in court, first. They want to be able to bully DNS resolvers based on mere allegations without due process to censor whatever sites they tell them to. These companies don't want to have to prove specific cases of infringement in court, rather they are seeking to gain the general power to censor whoever and whatever they want by gaining the legal means to do it.