Site blocking reaches the US: Issa files H.R. 10364 — and it covers DNS resolvers

On 14 September 2026 Representative Darrell Issa, chair of the House Judiciary subcommittee on intellectual property, filed H.R. 10364 — the American Copyright Protection Act — establishing court procedures for blocking access to foreign online locations engaged in copyright piracy. The bill was referred to the House Judiciary Committee the same day. Its full text had not yet been published at the time of writing; the mechanics below come from the discussion draft circulated since 2025 and from Public Knowledge, which reviewed the introduced version.

What the bill does

Under the circulated framework, a copyright owner petitions one of a roster of designated federal judges — at least one per circuit, maintained by the Judicial Conference — to declare a target a “foreign piracy site”: operated from abroad or by an operator who cannot be found, with infringement as its primary purpose and no significant lawful use. The judge can then order service providers to take “all reasonable steps” to keep US users off the site. Orders run up to 12 months, providers get 10 days to comply (less for live events), the Copyright Office publishes every active order, and a third party blocked through a rightsholder’s error can claim up to $250,000 in compensation.

The decisive detail is who “service provider” covers: not just ISPs but public DNS resolvers above a small-provider threshold. Root and TLD nameservers are carved out; Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 and Google’s 8.8.8.8 are not.

Why the resolver point matters

A block at an ISP’s resolver ends at that ISP’s customers. A public resolver answers queries from every country with one policy per domain. When French courts ordered Google and Cloudflare to block pirate sports domains for Canal+, both complied by geofencing — withholding answers only from users located in France. But that was an engineering choice, not a legal requirement, and nothing in the US draft says an order stops at the border. Public Knowledge’s reading: “one court can cut off access to a website globally, based on a single individual’s filing and an expedited procedure.”

Three bills, two retirements, one deadline

H.R. 10364 is one of three live tracks. Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s FADPA (H.R. 791, January 2025) uses standard district-court jurisdiction; Senator Thom Tillis’s Block BEARD draft reaches search engines and platforms as well. The Tillis and Lofgren bills are being merged into a single bicameral text, and both clocks are short: Tillis leaves the Senate in January 2027, and Issa is retiring at the end of this term. Whoever’s framework prevails, the years of stalemate since SOPA/PIPA collapsed in 2012 are visibly over — the argument in Washington is no longer whether to block, but how.

What this means for you

For brands and rightsholders, US site blocking would close the loudest gap in the global enforcement map. Today you can block a pirate or clone site in Romania, Chile, France or Italy — we have covered Romania’s 808-domain session and Chile’s standing DNS pipeline — while the same site stays fully reachable in its biggest market. A US blocking order, especially one binding global resolvers, changes the economics of running a mirror farm aimed at American users.

The same machinery cuts the other way: DNS-level blocking is blunt, and the $250,000 error clause exists because legitimate sites will be caught — Italy’s Piracy Shield has already taken down hotels, shops and telehealth services by mistake. If your brand runs shared infrastructure, monitoring what lands on blocking registers becomes part of defensive hygiene, not just offence.

Counsel’s note. Most rightsholders read headlines like this and wait — for the bill, the merger, the vote. Waiting is a strategy for losing a year: none of these bills is law, all face the same opposition that killed SOPA, and two sponsors are racing their own retirements. The working method is to treat US site blocking as a future second front and keep attacking the existing one: the host, the registrar, the CDN and the app store behind each infringing site respond to well-founded notices today, in every market at once. We broke the method down in our guide to finding the real host behind Cloudflare.