Faced with the rise in power of IPTV and livestreaming sites which illegally broadcast live sporting events, repression is increasingly strong. For several years now, strategies to purely and simply block the incriminated servers have been put in place. At the risk of blocking perfectly legitimate services? This is the risk pointed out by an expert in the sector.
Increasingly significant blockages
In 2017, dynamic injunctions emerged in the United Kingdom in response to pirate broadcasts of the Premier League. Concretely, Internet service providers are therefore forced to block certain servers which allow matches to be broadcast illegally.
Other countries have since followed this path, and in particular Italy, which passed a law on the subject in 2023. Our neighbors have set up the Piracy Shield which deploys an infrastructure specially dedicated to these blockages .
Be careful not to go too far
In an interview relayed by the site TorrentFreakChris White, executive at Friend MTS, a company that offers anti-piracy solutions, returned to these issues. He recalls in this regard:
This summer, the broadcast industry held its breath when news broke of excessive blocking of Italy’s new anti-piracy platform Piracy Shield, run by AGCOM, the country’s communications regulator. No one wants to be responsible for blocking legitimate online services, damaging brands and impacting revenue.
Here it refers to the blocking of the Cloudfare service and its customers’ websites due to the fact that a Cloudfare IP address was mistakenly placed in the Piracy Shield.
The latter therefore advocates a more thoughtful approach to the problem and a more prudent use of these automated solutions:
As the industry digests this risk, we expect to see more restraint and closer consideration of automated solutions and a move toward blocking services with proven accuracy and industry-proven monitoring technology.
He adds that this will happen through “Best-in-class surveillance and precision technologies to ensure no target causes collateral damage to legitimate services. »
The message has gotten through and it is all the more remarkable that someone at the heart of the fight against piracy is so aware of it. In any case, these methods have so far proven ineffective in countering Internet users’ appetite for IPTV which has never been so popular.
