This year, we fought back against the return of a terrible idea that hasn’t improved with age: site blocking laws. 

More than a decade ago, Congress tried to pass SOPA and PIPA—two sweeping bills that would have allowed the government and copyright holders to quickly shut down entire websites based on allegations of piracy. The backlash was massive. Internet users, free speech advocates, and tech companies flooded lawmakers with protests, culminating in an “Internet Blackout” on January 18, 2012. Turns out, Americans don’t like government-run internet blacklists. The bills were ultimately shelved.  

But we’ve never believed they were gone for good. The major media and entertainment companies that backed site blocking in the US in 2012 turned to pushing for site-blocking laws in other countries. Rightsholders continued to ask US courts for site-blocking orders, often winning them without a new law. And sure enough, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and its allies have asked Congress to try again. 

There were no less than three Congressional drafts of site-blocking legislation. Representative Zoe Lofgren kicked off the year with the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA). Fellow House of Representatives member Darrell Issa also claimed to be working on a bill that would make it offensively easy for a studio to block your access to a website based solely on the belief that there is infringement happening. Not to be left out, the Senate Judiciary Committee produced the terribly named Block BEARD Act.  

None of these three attempts to fundamentally alter the way you experience the internet moved too far after their press releases. But the number tells us that there is, once again, an appetite among major media conglomerates and politicians to resurrect SOPA/PIPA from the dead.  

None of these proposals fixes the flaws of SOPA/PIPA, and none ever could. Site blocking is a flawed idea and a disaster for free expression that no amount of rewriting will fix. There is no way to create a fast lane for removing your access to a website that is not a major threat to the open web. Just as we opposed SOPA/PIPA over ten years ago, we oppose these efforts.  

Site blocking bills seek to build a new infrastructure of censorship into the heart of the internet. They would enable court orders directed to the organizations that make the internet work, like internet service providers, domain name resolvers, and reverse proxy services, compelling them to help block US internet users from visiting websites accused of copyright infringement. The technical means haven’t changed much since 2012. - tThey involve blocking Internet Protocol addresses or domain names of websites. These methods are blunt—sledgehammers rather than scalpels. Today, many websites are hosted on cloud infrastructure or use shared IP addresses. Blocking one target can mean blocking thousands of unrelated sites. That kind of digital collateral damage has already happened in Austria, Italy, South Korea, France, and in the US, to name just a few.  

Given this downside, one would think the benefits of copyright enforcement from these bills ought to be significant. But site blocking is trivially easy to evade. Determined site owners can create the same content on a new domain within hours. Users who want to see blocked content can fire up a VPN or change a single DNS setting to get back online.  

The limits that lawmakers have proposed to put on these laws are an illusion. While ostensibly aimed at “foreign” websites, they sweep in any website that doesn’t conspicuously display a US origin, putting anonymity at risk. And despite the rhetoric of MPA and others that new laws would be used only by responsible companies against the largest criminal syndicates, laws don’t work that way. Massive new censorship powers invite abuse by opportunists large and small, and the costs to the economy, security, and free expression are widely borne. 

It’s time for Big Media and its friends in Congress to drop this flawed idea. But as long as they keep bringing it up, we’ll keep on rallying internet users of all stripes to fight it. 

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.

The state of streaming is... bad. It’s very bad. The first step in wanting to watch anything is a web search: “Where can I stream X?” Then you have to scroll past an AI summary with no answers, and then scroll past the sponsored links. After that, you find out that the thing you want to watch was made by a studio that doesn’t exist anymore or doesn’t have a streaming service. So, even though you subscribe to more streaming services than you could actually name, you will have to buy a digital copy to watch. A copy that, despite paying for it specifically, you do not actually own and might vanish in a few years. 

Then, after you paid to see something multiple times in multiple ways (theater ticket, VHS tape, DVD, etc.), the mega-corporations behind this nightmare will try to get Congress to pass laws to ensure you keep paying them. In the end, this is easier than making a product that works. Or, as someone put it on social media, these companies have forgotten “that their entire existence relies on being slightly more convenient than piracy.” 

It’s important to recognize this as we see more and more media mergers. These mergers are not about quality, they’re about control. 

In the old days, studios made a TV show. If the show was a hit, they increased how much they charged companies to place ads during the show. And if the show was a hit for long enough, they sold syndication rights to another channel. Then people could discover the show again, and maybe come back to watch it air live. In that model, the goal was to spread access to a program as much as possible to increase viewership and the number of revenue streams.  

Now, in the digital age, studios have picked up a Silicon Valley trait: putting all their eggs into the basket of “increasing the number of users.” To do that, they have to create scarcity. There has to be only one destination for the thing you’re looking for, and it has to be their own. And you shouldn’t be able to control the experience at all. They should.  

They’ve also moved away from creating buzzy new exclusives to get you to pay them. That requires risk and also, you know, paying creative people to make them. Instead, they’re consolidating.  

Media companies keep announcing mergers and acquisitions. They’ve been doing it for a long time, but it’s really ramped up in the last few years. And these mergers are bad for all the obvious reasons. There are the speech and censorship reasons that came to a head in, of all places, late night television. There are the labor issues. There are the concentration of power issues. There are the obvious problems that the fewer studios that exist the fewer chances good art gets to escape Hollywood and make it to our eyes and ears. But when it comes specifically to digital life there are these: consumer experience and ownership.  

First, the more content that comes under a single corporation’s control, the more they expect you to come to them for it. And the more they want to charge. And because there is less competition, the less they need to work to make their streaming app usable. They then enforce their hegemony by using the draconian copyright restrictions they’ve lobbied for to cripple smaller competitors, critics, and fair use.  

When everything is either Disney or NBCUniversal or Warner Brothers-Discovery-Paramount-CBS and everything is totally siloed, what need will they have to spend money improving any part of their product? Making things is hard, stopping others from proving how bad you are is easy, thanks to how broken copyright law is.  

Furthermore, because every company is chasing increasing subscriber numbers instead of multiple revenue streams, they have an interest in preventing you from ever again “owning” a copy of a work. This was always sort of part of the business plan, but it was on a scale of a) once every couple of years,  b) at least it came, in theory, with some new features or enhanced quality and c) you actually owned the copy you paid for. Now they want you to pay them every month for access to same copy. And, hey, the price is going to keep going up the fewer options you have. Or you will see more ads. Or start seeing ads where there weren’t any before.  

On the one hand, the increasing dependence on direct subscriber numbers does give users back some power. Jimmy Kimmel’s reinstatement by ABC was partly due to the fact that the company was about to announce a price hike for Disney+ and it couldn’t handle losing users due to the new price and due to popular outrage over Kimmel’s treatment.  

On the other hand, well, there's everything else. 

The latest kerfuffle is over the sale of Warner Brothers-Discovery, a company that was already the subject of a sale and merger resulting in the hyphen. Netflix was competiing against another recently merged media megazord of Paramount Skydance.  

Warner Brothers-Discovery accepted a bid from Netflix, enraging Paramount Skydance, which has now launched a hostile takeover.  

Now the optimum outcome is for neither of these takeovers to happen. There are already too few players in Hollywood. It does nothing for the health of the industry to allow either merger. A functioning antitrust regime would stop both the sale and the hostile takeover attempt, full stop. But Hollywood and the federal government are frequent collaborators, and the feds have little incentive to stop Hollywood’s behemoths from growing even further, as long as they continue to play their role pushing a specific view of American culture.    

The promise of the digital era was in part convenience. You never again had to look at TV listings to find out when something would be airing. Virtually unlimited digital storage meant everything would be at your fingertips. But then the corporations went to work to make sure it never happened. And with each and every merger, that promise gets further and further away.  

Note 12/10/2025: One line in this blog has been modified a few hours post-publication. The substance remains the same.