Here's another blow to pushing back against instant censorship mechanisms. France's parliament approved a professional sports law on July 21 that lets ARCOM, the audiovisual regulator, block "suspected" pirate sports streams in real time. You read that right; not proved pirate sports streams, just suspected.
Article 10 rewrites Article L. 333-10 of the sports code. That's the provision rights holders have used to block streaming sites. With the old process, a rightsholder won a court order against named domains, and when fresh domains turned up, ARCOM's agents confirmed each one was streaming matches illegally before ISPs were ordered to block it. That's according to TorrentFreak.
But the new law removes that check. In its place, an automated system now pushes newly spotted targets straight to providers during a live broadcast.
And the providers have to act "without delay."
The agents audit the new additions once they are live and a blocked party can appeal to ARCOM's president while the match is still being played.
Under this new regime, a site disappears first, and whether it should have gone down at all gets decided later. And that's only assuming someone contests it.
An order under the old rules came from the Court of Paris on July 8, when the French football league won a block against nine ISPs for the 2026/2027 season.
That order listed 30 domains, with ARCOM approving each new site added along the way.
That kind of approval is exactly what the new law strips out. The new rules still await formal implementation, expected later this year, and for now France's blocking runs the old, manual way.
Here's the problem with all of this, if it's not obvious already. The cost falls on legitimate sites that share infrastructure with a targeted stream and on their visitors, cut off without notice and left to seek a reversal after the match is over.
We only have to look to Spain to see what that level of overreach looks like at scale. In December 2024, Commercial Court No. 6 of Barcelona let LaLiga require Movistar, Vodafone and Orange to block IP addresses tied to unauthorized football streaming. The court upheld the order in March of 2025. For some time now, Spanish ISPs have blocked entire IP addresses rather than single domains, so any lawful site sharing an IP address with a stream goes offline too.
Vercel reported two of its addresses, 66.33.60.129 and 76.76.21.142, blocked on matchdays, cutting off paying customers including the startup Tinybird and Hello Magazine.
Cloudflare, GitHub Pages and BunnyCDN were caught the same way.
"In Spain, they block 10,000 pirate addresses on a single matchday, the equivalent of what we block in a year in France," said Sarah D'Arifat, legal director of BeIN Sports France, to FranceInfo.
The takedown design comes from Italy. In a study delivered to the Assemblee nationale in December 2025, ARCOM recommended the automated real-time system and cited Italy's "Piracy Shield" as precedent. As we've previous reported, that system has knocked Cloudflare and countless unrelated sites offline, and European ISPs have since demanded that rights holders be held liable for the damage from overblocking.
ARCOM originally kept the human review step because it considered overblocking potentially unconstitutional in France. But that review now happens after the block lands.
One other change widens exactly who can pull the trigger. Foreign entities that organize or hold rights to competitions abroad can now bring blocking actions in French courts themselves, which opens the door to Spain's LaLiga and England's Premier League.
This is a new overreaching takedown power devoid of due process that we'll need to track.
