In May, a Paris court ordered French internet service providers to block DNS resolution for six domains accused of streaming pirated tennis matches. Seven months later, that blocklist has expanded quietly to 118 domains, with no formal public record of how the additions were made or by whom. The sprawl reveals structural problems in copyright enforcement infrastructure that infrastructure operators and hosters should understand.
How blocklists grow in the shadows
Court orders usually specify a narrow scope: block these six sites. But the French blocklist expansion happened without new court filings, without public notification to ISPs, and apparently without a formal appeals mechanism for domains added later. The list simply grew, 19x its original size.
This pattern is common in DMCA-adjacent enforcement globally. A copyright holder or rights group identifies what they believe to be an infringing site, requests a block, and ISPs add the domain. The request becomes administrative routine. No one removes domains when they cease to host infringing content, when they change ownership, or when a government agency seizes them for other reasons.
Collateral damage: Innocent domains and seized infrastructure
Among the 118 blocked domains are two belonging to independent publishers who had nothing to do with piracy. One of them discovered the block only by checking whether the French ISP list included their own site—a troubling way to learn one's domain has been blackholed in an entire country.
More revealing: the blocklist contains at least one domain that the U.S. Government seized months before the list existed. That domain now sits idle, neither resolving nor hosting anything, yet remains on France's enforcement list. Its continued inclusion serves no copyright-protection purpose; it only demonstrates that removal mechanisms don't work. Once a domain lands on a blocklist, institutional inertia keeps it there.
Why this matters for operators
If you operate hosting infrastructure in Europe, particularly in France or other EU jurisdictions, you need to understand that DNS blocking orders can expand well beyond their original scope and that appeals processes may not exist. A domain you host can end up on a blocklist you never heard about, and your ISP customers may suddenly find their connection to your nameserver drops.
Even more concerning: these blocklists often reference infrastructure hosted far from the jurisdiction issuing the order. The French list reportedly points to servers in Hong Kong. This means that overseas hosting, no-logs nameservers, and distributed DNS infrastructure become attractive precisely because they make centralized blocking harder. But it also means that operators in lower-enforcement jurisdictions can find themselves inadvertently hosting on infrastructure that serves blocked domains.
If you're running a domain registry, registrar, or DNS provider, you should audit what happens when your domains appear on these unofficial, growing lists. Do you have internal processes to track them. Do you notify customers. Do you have a way to challenge the listing.
The transparency problem
Unlike DMCA takedown notices in the United States, which are logged by platforms and made searchable, the French blocklist operates with almost no public record. No one publishes which domains were added, when, or why. There's no central database, no appeal filing deadline, and no copyright holder signature or contact information.
This opacity is a feature, not a bug—it keeps the process moving fast. But it also means that domain owners have almost no way to defend themselves, and infrastructure operators have no reliable way to know whether their nameservers or hosting are caught in the net.
For hosters and DNS operators working in jurisdictions with DMCA-ignored or privacy-focused policies, this dynamic has a practical implication: enforcement through blocklists is becoming the primary vector, not DMCA notices or court injunctions. Blocking is cheaper, faster, and requires no due process. Understanding how these lists form, expand, and persist is essential infrastructure knowledge.
