Content platforms regularly deploy blanket policies to shield themselves from liability: ban entire categories, refuse services wholesale, filter by keyword. These measures appear decisive and risk-averse. Yet the evidence from ongoing legal battles suggests they often fail at their stated purpose—stopping actual infringement—while inflicting collateral damage on lawful operators.
The Asymmetry of Blanket Bans
A recent court filing from textbook publishers challenging Google's ebook advertising policies illustrates this paradox. Publishers arguing that Google should face liability for ads appearing on pirate sites pointed out that the company's response—blocking ebook ads entirely—actually harmed legitimate sellers while leaving pirate operations untouched.
The logic is straightforward from a technical standpoint. A pirate ebook site does not primarily derive revenue from Google Ads. Its monetisation comes from subscriptions, paywalls, or affiliate links to commercial platforms. An indiscriminate ban on ebook advertisements removes income from publishers, bookstores, and independent retailers who rely on paid search placement. The pirates, by contrast, continue operating with minimal disruption.
This mismatch reveals a fundamental weakness in platform-level enforcement: one-size-fits-all rules cannot distinguish between bad actors and good ones. They are blunt instruments, and blunt instruments often hit the wrong targets.
Why Technical Specificity Matters
Hosting and infrastructure operators face similar pressures. A datacenter, payment processor, or content delivery network might receive a complaint about a single abusive customer. The path of least resistance is often a full account termination or outright category ban—all VPNs, all file-sharing platforms, all cryptocurrency wallets—rather than investigating the specific conduct.
From a legal liability standpoint, this defensive posture feels safe. From an enforcement standpoint, it fails. Real bad actors are mobile. They migrate to new platforms, rebrand, use proxies and resellers. The operators they displace are rarely the ones conducting large-scale piracy; they are small publishers, privacy advocates, and legitimate service providers with limited resources to fight blanket restrictions.
Courts and regulators are beginning to notice. The Supreme Court's Cox decision, cited by the publishers in their case, established that platforms can face liability for direct copyright infringement if they have knowledge of it and fail to act. However, knowledge must be specific: a platform cannot simply claim it had no reason to know about a problem it wilfully ignored. Conversely, a platform cannot claim it complied with law simply by banning an entire sector.
The Case for Proportionate Response
Effective anti-piracy enforcement requires evidence gathering, targeted action, and monitoring of repeat offenders. It is expensive and labour-intensive. A blanket ban is cheap and simple. But cost efficiency for the platform provider becomes a cost transferred to legitimate businesses and users.
Some hosting and payment infrastructure providers have begun distinguishing between abuse categories: they maintain specific policies for genuinely illegal content, apply heightened monitoring to higher-risk sectors, and preserve access for lawful operations. This approach is more defensible legally and more effective at reducing actual harm.
It also acknowledges a basic reality: the internet hosts both lawful and unlawful content simultaneously. A privacy-focused hosting provider, a no-logs VPN, an anonymous domain registrar—these services have legitimate uses. A small fraction of their user base may commit copyright infringement or other crimes. The question is whether the provider should retain knowledge of, and responsibility for, specific abuses, or abandon the entire customer category to avoid the burden of enforcement.
Looking Forward
Litigation over Google's ebook policies will likely reinforce that platforms cannot evade liability through categorical refusal to serve a market. Instead, they must demonstrate proportionate, specific, and documented responses to actual infringement—or face the possibility that broad bans themselves constitute negligent or knowing facilitation of the very harms they claim to prevent.
For infrastructure and hosting operators, the lesson is sobering: a blanket ban is not a substitute for compliance. Real compliance requires investigation, precision, and the discipline to act against bad actors whilst preserving service for legitimate ones. It is harder work, but it is also far more defensible.
