When Enforcing Copyright Starts Breaking the Internet’s Plumbing

Around the world, courts are increasingly allowing holders of intellectual property (IP) rights to shift the cost and burden of enforcement onto neutral third parties — including the organisations that keep the internet running.

In principle, those who benefit financially from IP protection should bear the cost of enforcing it. Yet in practice, large rights holders are targeting intermediary infrastructure providers — such as DNS resolvers — because pursuing the actual infringing parties is complex, time-consuming, and expensive.

This legal trend is now affecting the very foundations of how the internet functions — including the DNS resolvers that translate every web address into the digital pathways we use daily.

Recent court orders have sought to compel DNS providers, including free public services like Quad9, to block domains allegedly associated with unauthorised streaming of live sports and other copyrighted material. Instead of targeting the platforms that profit from infringement, IP owners are increasingly going after the neutral infrastructure providers that simply make the internet work.

For large commercial players such as Google, Cloudflare, or Cisco, these costs — legal, lobbying, or engineering — are absorbed as part of their business overhead.

For small, mission-driven nonprofits like Quad9, they represent an existential threat.

Which raises some important questions:

Governance and Control

• Should neutral, technical infrastructure be held responsible for the actions of others?
• How far should courts reach across jurisdictions to impose national laws on global networks?
• Who ultimately benefits from an internet governed by private legal action rather than public policy debate?
• Are we eroding the principle of network neutrality by making intermediaries arbiters of legality?

Innovation and Resilience

• Can small nonprofits survive under legal obligations designed for global corporations?
• What happens to privacy and resiliency when only a handful of corporations can afford to comply?
• Does shifting enforcement to infrastructure providers risk fragmenting the internet into nationally controlled networks?
• What precedent does this set for other forms of digital infrastructure, such as cloud storage or content delivery networks?

Rights and Freedoms

• At what point does legal compliance become de facto censorship?
• How should international law balance intellectual property rights with the right to access information?
• Is collateral damage to open, privacy-respecting services an acceptable price for enforcing IP rights?

These questions go to the heart of how the internet should function — open, fair, and accessible to all.

If you share that vision or can support Quad9’s mission to keep the internet private and secure for everyone, we’d love to hear from you (enquiry@quad9.net).