Two members of Congress have been quietly merging two separate site-blocking bills into one.
Representative Zoe Lofgren (D) of California and Senator Thom Tillis (R) of North Carolina's bill would let copyright holders petition federal courts to order American internet service providers and DNS resolvers to block entire foreign domains.
Comcast. Verizon. Spectrum. T-Mobile. Cloudflare. Google. OpenDNS. All of them, ordered to refuse to resolve a domain on the strength of a court order obtained by the MPA's lawyers.
Once the law exists, any foreign domain a federal judge finds objectionable disappears from the address book of every American household that does not run its own resolver.
This is what fourteen years of post-SOPA institutional memory loss looks like.
In 2012, the Stop Online Piracy Act died on the floor of Congress because the public found out what was in it before it passed. Wikipedia went dark in protest. Reddit went dark. Google put a black censor bar across its homepage. The bill sponsors retreated. The lesson the entertainment industry took from that defeat was not that the public opposed internet censorship. The lesson was that public attention was the problem.
So this time the bill has been drafted in private. There has been no blackout. There has been no consumer-facing campaign. The strategy is to negotiate the details quietly with the parties most able to refuse, and the public never finds out the law exists until they cannot reach a website.
In early 2026, the Supreme Court ruled in Cox Communications v. Sony Music that an ISP cannot be held liable for a billion dollars because some of its customers downloaded music. Justice Sotomayor, in a concurrence, complained that the ruling now permits ISPs to sell internet access to "every single infringer who wants one" without lifting a finger to prevent infringement. The publishers and the studios read that as a green light to ask Congress for the lever the courts no longer hand them.
This is the lever they want. A federal court order. A list of foreign domains. ISPs and DNS resolvers compelled by law to block on receipt.
The list of countries that already have laws like this includes the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, India, Brazil, and Russia. The MPA cites this as evidence that the United States is behind. In Spain, IP-level blocking ordered by the football league has knocked legitimate businesses offline because they happened to share a server with a blocked domain. In Italy, the Piracy Shield system has blocked Cloudflare entirely on multiple occasions. In the United Kingdom, blocking orders have been used to take down sites that were not piracy sites at all, on the basis that they linked to piracy sites.
The collateral damage is the system working as designed. The blunter the instrument, the easier the enforcement.
There is no version of this law that targets only the bad actors. Domains are not isolated. Hosting is shared. CDNs are shared. The address book is a single document. Once the law exists, the list of blocked domains will only grow, the criteria will only loosen, and the appeal process will only formalize what was already done.
Anything that depends on resolving a foreign domain becomes contingent on the goodwill of a federal court and the lobbying budget of whoever wants the domain alive. Every shadow library, every IPTV mirror, every privacy-respecting service whose lawyers cannot match Disney's. All of them will be one petition away from disappearing from the address book of every household whose internet runs through Comcast.
Most people do not run a VPN, do not configure a custom DNS, do not know what an IP address is. Most people get the internet their ISP serves them. The bill is written for those people. The bill assumes that if the road is closed at the resolver, the destination effectively does not exist.
This bill will outlive its sponsors, its pretext, and the industries that bought it. Laws granting infrastructure-level censorship power do not get repealed. They get expanded. Every kill switch finds a hand.