ISP Blocking of No-IP's Dynamic DNS Enters Week 2

Summary

In a legal dispute now at the U.S. Supreme Court, the world’s leading record labels and Cox Communications disagree on many things, including how to respond to online piracy. The labels’ preferred solution is to sever subscribers’ access to the internet. Cox believes that denying internet access is excessive. The case is much more complex than that as the venue suggests, but one aspect seems clearer when viewed in its own light. When a person gets caught pirating music online, should everyone in their household be denied access to banking, health care, education, and everything else people need to simply exist? Is collective punishment the right way to satisfy a commercial dispute, between a record company and an ISP, over alleged activity of which the family likely had zero knowledge, and were never in a position to control or prevent? Collective Punishment, Every Single Week The proposition above sounds fundamentally unfair, because punishing innocent people is always unfair. Billions of people understand and respect the principle of individual responsibility and violations are quite rightly viewed with contempt. Yet, some will argue that life is full of unfairness. Inconvenience for a few people is inevitable when solving important copyright disputes involving a lot more money than most people have ever seen. In Spain, an important copyright dispute and accompanying site-blocking order certainly don’t authorize collective punishment on an unprecedented level. Yet, for several hours, several times each week, local ISPs now block hundreds of Cloudflare IP addresses to prevent access to unidentified pirate streaming services run by unidentified people. There’s no discrimination; ISP’s deploy blocking measures that affect their own customers, denying access to websites using Cloudflare’s services and any others that also happen to be blocked. There appears to be no warning and little transparency. ISPs never inform customers of incoming blocking, and it’s not uncommo...