A lawsuit seeking $19.5 million in damages against Anna's Archive includes an unusual procedural component: an injunction naming more than twenty domain registries, hosting providers, and service companies—including Cloudflare and Njalla—as parties compelled to disable access to the site's domains. This approach signals a shift in how copyright holders pursue enforcement, and it raises important questions about the technical and legal exposure facing infrastructure operators.
How Injunctions Target Infrastructure, Not Just Content
Traditional copyright enforcement focuses on the infringer directly. Courts issue takedown notices under the DMCA, and hosting providers comply by removing infringing content. This case takes a different route: rather than suing only Anna's Archive's operators, the publishing group is naming the infrastructure layer itself—registrars, hosting companies, and DNS operators—as defendants bound by an injunction.
The legal mechanism is straightforward in theory. An injunction can bind any party with the technical ability to block access. If a registrar controls a domain's nameserver records, it can be ordered to disable resolution. If a hosting provider controls the nameserver itself, it faces similar obligations. A CDN provider like Cloudflare sits at an intersection: it handles DNS queries and can redirect or block traffic at the network edge.
The practical effect is that the injunction doesn't merely ask these companies to respond to individual DMCA notices. It creates a standing order—an affirmative obligation to monitor and prevent access to specific domains across their entire infrastructure.
Privacy Registrars and the Compliance Dilemma
Njalla, a domain registrar known for privacy-focused practices and acceptance of alternative payment methods, appears alongside Cloudflare in the complaint. Privacy registrars occupy a legally precarious position. They typically operate in jurisdictions that prioritise owner anonymity and resist routine disclosure of WHOIS data. Yet they remain subject to US court orders when operating in US commerce or serving US customers.
An injunction naming a privacy registrar effectively forces disclosure and action against a customer—potentially the very customer whose anonymity the registrar was contracted to protect. The legal conflict is acute: comply with the injunction and breach the registrar's privacy commitment, or refuse and face contempt of court.
This dynamic matters particularly for offshore and privacy-focused hosting providers. Recent legal actions suggest courts are willing to pursue this route, meaning infrastructure operators in this space must now factor in not only DMCA takedown volume but also the risk of named-party injunctions that override their operational and privacy policies.
Jurisdictional Jurisdiction Shopping and Network Effects
The breadth of the injunction—naming more than twenty entities—reflects a deliberate strategy to eliminate workarounds. If only one registrar or host is named, the site operator can simply migrate to an unnamed provider. By naming dozens of infrastructure providers, the plaintiff aims to make migration technically infeasible.
This approach has consequences for how the hosting industry structures itself. Operators relying on smaller or less legally visible registrars and providers may initially seem insulated from such orders. But as case law accumulates, courts gain confidence in naming entire categories of service providers. A subsequent injunction might cast a wider net or include language binding unnamed providers in a given category.
The strategy also reveals why choice of hosting jurisdiction matters. A domain registered in Iceland through a privacy-focused registrar might seem insulated from US copyright law. But if that registrar accepts payment from US customers or operates servers in the US, it can be sued in US federal court and bound by a US injunction. The technical fact of jurisdiction shopping does not prevent legal jurisdiction from following.
Compliance and Automation at Scale
For a large infrastructure provider like Cloudflare, implementing a named injunction requires technical infrastructure. The company must identify all queries for the listed domains, decide which to block or redirect, and maintain that policy across thousands of edge servers globally. Mistakes or delays open the provider to contempt findings.
Smaller providers face a different problem: the cost of compliance may exceed the revenue from a single customer. A privacy registrar serving a few thousand domains might need to hire legal staff and deploy monitoring systems just to track and comply with injunctions. That overhead becomes a disincentive to serving customers in contentious spaces.
The cumulative effect of multiple injunctions is a form of economic pressure on the entire infrastructure stack. As more legal actions target the service-provider layer, smaller and more principled providers may exit markets or adopt blanket policies against hosting domains in copyright-sensitive categories.
What This Means Going Forward
Infrastructure operators and hosting providers should treat injunctions naming their services as a material legal and operational risk, not an edge case. The Anna's Archive case illustrates that copyright holders and their legal teams now understand the leverage available in naming infrastructure parties. Future suits are likely to follow the same playbook.
For privacy-focused registrars and offshore hosts, the challenge is acute. Anonymity and DMCA resistance were historically separable from compliance with court orders. That separation is narrowing. An injunction binds the registrar or host regardless of the jurisdiction in which the customer's content originated or where the customer resides. The technical and legal architecture of the Internet means that no provider can truly operate outside the reach of a US federal court order—so long as that provider operates in a way that touches US commerce or serves US customers.
