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Every Internet Provider in U.S. Ordered to Block These 3 Services

keely

A federal jury judge in the EU S District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered all internet service provider in the United States to block three pirate streaming services operated by doe defendants, on April 26th.

According to reports, the defendants hid behind fake online identities and did not show up for court.

The services being affected are Israel.tv, Israel-tv.com, and Sdarot.tv. The ruling adds that all ISP's must comply and block them, even if they are not on the list, which includes: Comcast, charter, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

How is this not overreach??

Trending Politics reports:

The court went on to order that all Internet service providers within the United States would block the access to the websites listed in the court case. It even extended the order to any website the “doe defendants“, which is a fictitious defendant, may create in the future. It isn’t clear how this is going to be enforced since the defendants were never identified. It went on to say that Internet service providers were allowed to block them by any technical means that they had on hand. That included blocking users from being able to connect or refusing to allow DNS, which is your domain name server, to connect to the website.

The three lawsuits were filed by Israeli TV and movie producers and providers against the doe defendants who operate these websites. Each of the rulings awarded $7.65 million in damages. The order also contains permanent injunctions against the defendants themselves and other types of companies that provide services to the defendants or may do so in the future. These companies include Cloudflair, GoDaddy, Google, and Namecheap. In all three of the cases none of the defendants responded to the complaints. Nor did they appear in court.

The ruling states, “Defendants have gone to great lengths to conceal themselves and their ill-gotten proceeds from Plaintiffs’ and this Court’s detection, including by using multiple false identities and addresses associated with their operations and purposely deceptive contact information for the infringing Website."

The ruling went further to target web hosts and banks. The judge ordered domain registrars and registries to transfer the domain names to plaintiffs. The ruling included injunctions against third parties providing services used in connection with the defendants’ operations. This included web hosts, content delivery networks, DNS providers, VPN providers, web designers, search based online advertising services, and others. Financial institutions also faced a similar ban on doing business with the blocked websites. It stated that the plaintiff shall have an ongoing authority to serve this order to any party controlling or otherwise holding such accounts until they have recovered the full payment of monies owed to them by the defendant under this order. This would apply to PayPal, banks, and all payment providers.

How much power is too much power? If they can ban these services now, what is stopping them from banning other websites and services in the future simply because they do not like them? This is a slippery slope.