In the ongoing fight against online piracy, it is understandable that rights holders aim for operational disruption. Nobody should pretend that infringement is harmless or that creators do not deserve effective remedies. But there is a difference between solving a problem and redesigning the Internet’s core infrastructure in ways that could weaken the very rights the remedy is meant to protect.

Right now, a growing chorus is treating India’s “lock and suspend” approach as a success story and a model for the world. India’s courts are confronting a real enforcement dilemma. Large-scale infringement is often driven by actors operating outside national jurisdiction, and traditional cross-border remedies can be slow, expensive, and ineffective. Rights holders are understandably frustrated.

The concern is not the legitimacy of that frustration. It is what happens when a solution designed for one jurisdiction is celebrated as a template for global enforcement. India is simply the first major jurisdiction where this model has been deployed at scale and praised internationally. The model’s structural implications, however, reach far beyond one country. They involve the global architecture of the Internet itself.

What’s being celebrated

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), in its 2026 Special 301 submission, lauds Delhi High Court orders that require domain name registrars to “lock” and “suspend” domains and to provide registrant details. It claims that “more than 400 piracy domains have been completely wiped from the Internet” and frames this as “creative relief” to tackle piracy “on a global scale.”

TorrentFreak recently captured the same sentiment from U.S. rights holders, describing applause for India’s expanding “lock and suspend” practice and the idea that it can be used to take pirate sites down broadly through Indian court orders.

If you stop there, India’s approach sounds like a win because the temptation is to measure success in takedown numbers. But enforcement architecture matters more than weekly disruption statistics. If the structure being built today erodes jurisdictional limits, proportionality, and procedural safeguards, rights holders may find that the same tools celebrated in one case become destabilizing in many others.

But the details matter, and so does what happens next when other governments copy the pattern.

The core problem: This turns DNS operators into global enforcement deputies

The DNS is not the content layer. Registrars and registries do not host, curate, publish, or monetize the underlying material. They provide naming and routing primitives that everything else builds on.

When courts shift enforcement into DNS infrastructure, they are not removing infringing files. They are disabling access to entire services at the naming layer, often with blunt instruments and a very high risk of collateral damage.

Even in the IIPA telling, the goal is not simply to block access in India. It is explicitly about global-scale disruption and wiping domains from the Internet. That is the point where this stops being a local remedy and becomes a model of infrastructure control with global operational consequences.

If you like the outcome today, you still have to ask the question that decides whether this is a sustainable system tomorrow:

Are we prepared for a world in which a single national court can, under its own standards of proportionality, functionally shape global DNS operations through orders directed at infrastructure providers, including foreign companies? Because once that door is open, it does not stay limited to piracy. It never does.

The concern here is not uniquely Indian. Any jurisdiction that discovers it can achieve global impact through DNS-layer remedies will face the same incentive: use infrastructure leverage to solve local enforcement challenges. The question is not whether one country is acting in bad faith. The question is what happens when this becomes standard practice everywhere.

Why this is unsustainable, even if we all want effective anti-piracy enforcement

Let’s be clear about something upfront. Internet infrastructure providers are not neutral about piracy. Across hosting, cloud, DNS, abuse teams, and security operations, infrastructure companies spend enormous time and resources to mitigate infringement, fraud, and abuse. We all want effective, scalable, and lawful ways to combat piracy.

Infrastructure-level remedies may be appropriate in limited, clearly defined circumstances, particularly against repeat infringers deliberately structured to evade enforcement. The concern arises when such remedies shift from exceptional measures to default tools.

That is where the structural question begins. Creators deserve effective remedies, and infrastructure providers regularly support lawful enforcement within appropriate jurisdictional bounds. The issue is not whether piracy should be addressed, but whether turning the DNS into a global enforcement lever is a sustainable or responsible way to do it.

1. It does not scale without overreach

A model that depends on courts issuing fast, repeated, escalating infrastructure orders will inevitably expand in scope and accelerate in volume. That is not a moral argument. It is an operational reality.

The pressure will always be to widen the net: more domains, more variants, more dynamic orders, more categories of intermediaries, more proactive duties. IIPA itself frames these as positive precedents and explicitly speculates about other types of intermediaries that courts might be prepared to rope in next.

That is the slippery slope, stated plainly in the advocates’ own framing.

2. Infrastructure remedies create collateral damage by design

At the DNS layer, you cannot remove just the infringing part. You disable a name that may route email, APIs, customer support systems, and legitimate content alongside allegedly infringing content.

That is why infrastructure enforcement tends toward overblocking. It is also why it becomes attractive to those seeking quick, visible wins, regardless of error rates.

3. Due process erodes as speed becomes the primary objective

When the priority becomes “lock and suspend now,” the safeguards that ensure fairness quickly get treated as delays that need to be removed.

In practice, high-volume, fast takedown systems without meaningful adversarial process produce predictable outcomes: mistakes, abuse, and minimal recourse for affected parties, especially smaller operators.

4. It incentivizes jurisdiction shopping and Internet fragmentation

Once infrastructure-level remedies are seen as capable of producing global outcomes, courts everywhere face the same temptation. Intellectual property disputes, trademark conflicts, defamation claims, national security assertions—each becomes a candidate for infrastructure leverage. The jurisdiction that moves first shapes the precedent others will follow.

In that environment, a trademark recognized in one jurisdiction can effectively gain global leverage through domain-level controls, even where competing rights or legitimate uses exist elsewhere. That risks creating a de facto race among national courts to assert influence over global naming infrastructure.

Rights holders outside the leading enforcement jurisdiction should think carefully about what that means for their own long-term interests.

Infrastructure-level enforcement accelerates fragmentation. It also invites retaliation. Other jurisdictions will adopt similar tools for their own priorities, including ones you may strongly oppose.

If you are cheering this because you think it is only aimed at bad actors, pause and consider how often governments agree on who the bad actors are.

5. It pushes compliance obligations onto the wrong layer

IIPA notes that foreign domain registrars tend to be non-compliant with disclosure obligations.

That should be a warning sign, not a reason to escalate. Making the global infrastructure layer comply with national court orders is exactly the kind of demand that produces cross-border legal conflicts, inconsistent obligations, and eventual market exit or service withdrawal. In many cases, mandatory disclosure requirements may directly conflict with data protection obligations in other jurisdictions, including under frameworks such as the GDPR, placing operators in the untenable position of choosing between violating one jurisdiction’s court order or another jurisdiction’s privacy and fundamental rights protections.

If enforcement requires coercing neutral naming providers into roles they cannot safely or consistently perform, the remedy is misaligned. The naming layer is also the entry point to participation in the digital economy. Domain registration is the first step for local businesses, nonprofits, startups, and creators seeking lawful presence online. When enforcement tools at that layer become expansive or unpredictable, they do not just affect alleged infringers. They affect the stability and reliability of the onramp that legitimate actors depend on to launch and grow.

You are building a weapon you will not control

There is a temptation to see infrastructure control as a convenient shortcut around the very real challenges of cross-border enforcement. Piracy is distributed. Operators hop hosts. Domains change. It is frustrating.

But infrastructure-level control is not a scalpel. It is leverage. And leverage never stays in the hands of the people you agree with.

Internet infrastructure providers will comply with lawful court orders in the jurisdictions where they operate. That is not the question. The question is what kind of enforcement environment rights holders are helping to normalize. In an infrastructure-first model, a sweeping win for one rights holder today can become precedent that weakens jurisdictional limits, procedural safeguards, and enforcement predictability for all others tomorrow.

Once you normalize the idea that courts should be able to order global DNS operators to suspend and preemptively block at scale, you normalize a censorship-capable enforcement mechanism at the naming layer.

Even if you trust the current decision makers, you are creating a template for less trusted ones.

What a better approach looks like

If your goal is sustainable, legitimate enforcement that creators can rely on long-term, you should want remedies that:

• Target actors who actually control the content and profit flows
• Preserve due process and minimize collateral damage
• Operate within clear jurisdictional limits
• Are proportionate to the harm alleged and narrowly tailored to the specific violation
• Are transparent, auditable, and appealable
• Do not convert neutral Internet infrastructure into enforcement agents

Jurisdictional limits are far more workable at the hosting or service layer, where operators have physical presence and clearer territorial nexus. At that layer, remedies can often be tailored to actors within a court’s legitimate reach. In addition, established cross-border legal mechanisms, including mutual legal assistance processes and other treaty-based frameworks, already exist to address situations where enforcement must extend beyond one jurisdiction.

At the DNS layer, by contrast, enforcement orders often have unavoidable global reach, making territorial limits difficult to preserve in practice and sidestepping the structured cooperation mechanisms designed for precisely these kinds of disputes.

There are many tools available to support enforcement at the hosting or service layer, including: coordinated actions against hosting where appropriate, payment and ad network disruption when tied to illicit operations, better cross-border cooperation mechanisms, and narrowly scoped orders with clear evidentiary thresholds.

None of those require redesigning the DNS into a global enforcement choke point.

A win that breaks the system is not a win

If you are a rights holder, think a step ahead. Not about this week’s takedown numbers, but about what you are legitimizing as the next decade’s enforcement architecture. Wherever this model takes root, whether in India, Europe, the United States, or elsewhere, it carries the same structural consequence: infrastructure becomes the enforcement layer of first resort. A win that depends on infrastructure leverage rather than proportionate, jurisdictionally bounded remedies is not a durable win. It is a shift in how the Internet functions.

We can fight piracy without turning the DNS into a policy weapon.

If we build a world where infrastructure control is the default answer, we will all live in it, and not just the pirates.