Today, the 2026 FIFA World Cup officially kicked off with the opener between Mexico and South Africa.

With a record number of 48 participating countries and 104 matches in well over a month, the high-profile tournament is the largest live broadcasting operation the sport has ever seen.

The FIFA World Cup is also the most valuable sports event, with roughly $4 billion in broadcasting rights on the line for a single tournament. Rightsholders do everything in their power to protect these exclusive broadcasts, in part through piracy blocking efforts.

While sports broadcasters believe that far-reaching anti-piracy measures are needed to protect their financial interests, critics warn that piracy countermeasures should not be disproportionate.

‘Fighting Piracy Without Breaking the Internet’

To mark the start of the World Cup, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) Europe, a trade group that represents major tech players including Amazon, Cloudflare, and Google , published an explainer detailing piracy blocking risks.

The document, “Fighting Piracy Without Breaking the Internet,” criticizes blocking efforts based on IP addresses and the DNS. CCIA argues these methods are too blunt to separate legal from illegal content, since a single IP address or domain name can be used by thousands of unrelated services.

The result, it says, is that many lawful businesses and public services are taken offline alongside the pirate streaming targets.

Charlotte Dantin, CCIA Europe’s Intellectual Property and Audiovisual Policy Manager, cautions against the slowly expanding private and automated site blocking efforts.

“Major sporting events must not become a testing ground for private, automated censorship of internet infrastructure. Illegal streaming can and should be addressed, but enforcement must remain lawful, proportionate, and subject to independent judicial oversight.”

“The mistakes already visible in national blocking experiments should not be allowed to proliferate across the EU. When IP addresses are added to opaque blocking lists without continuous court review or meaningful redress, innocent businesses and users suffer. Piracy enforcement must target pirates, not the basic infrastructure that underpins the internet.”

Rightsholders as ‘De Facto’ Piracy Regulators

CCIA is not alone in its concerns about privatized blocking measures, and it points to independent backing. A study published in April by two copyright researchers, João Pedro Quintais of the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law and Miquel Aznar of the University of Valencia, reached similar conclusions.

Their paper, “ Between Effectiveness and Fundamental Rights ,” does not dispute that blocking works. On the contrary, it accepts that blocking measures meaningfully reduce piracy.

According to the authors, the main concern is that this effectiveness is increasingly achieved by handing over public enforcement powers to private actors, turning them into “de facto regulators of internet traffic.”

The researchers found that courts increasingly let private rightsholders compile their own blocklists, with an order from Barcelona, Spain, as the clearest example.

As we previously covered, a December 2024 order from a Barcelona court allows LaLiga and its partners to identify the IP addresses that providers should block, without clearly defining how those addresses are chosen or how wrongly blocked parties can appeal.

Collateral Damage

Both CCIA and the researchers ultimately warn that the expanding piracy blocking efforts are not without risk. In fact, recent blocking efforts in Spain and Italy have resulted in several overblocking incidents.

The research, for example, points to the temporary blocking of the Redsys payment platform in Spain and of Google Drive in Italy as cases that were anything but hypothetical.

In addition to directly disrupting third-party services, CCIA’s explainer notes that blocking requirements are expanding to more intermediaries, including CDN and VPN providers, which puts these companies in an ‘impossible’ position.

“CDN, DNS, and VPN providers face liability, for both failing to block quickly and for overblocking lawful content. Moreover, obliging VPNs to enforce copyright undermines the privacy-by-design and cybersecurity of the VPN ecosystem,” CCIA notes.

The U.S. Finale

Site blocking is now established in dozens of countries, and in most it operates under some form of judicial or administrative oversight. That oversight, however, varies widely in quality, and transparency is limited. With increased calls for tighter measures, concerns are growing.

The research and CCIA’s report warn that there’s a slippery slope when it comes to expanding blocking powers. And with rightsholders requesting tougher enforcement measures, caution is warranted.

With the FIFA World Cup underway, it will be worth watching whether new site-blocking stories unfold before the final kicks off in New York on July 19. In India, they already have: days before kickoff , the Delhi High Court handed rightsholder Zee a dynamic injunction to block pirate streams of the tournament in real time.

That brings us to an interesting parallel. After well over a decade of site blocking expansion around the globe, the ‘final’ blocking battle is set to take place in U.S. Congress later this year.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.