A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website
336 comments
·August 24, 2025djoldman
magmaus3
the blog post was written before the page was changed
https://web.archive.org/web/20250130115412/https://cuii.info... said
> The Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet (CUII) is an independent body in Germany. It was founded by German internet access providers and copyright holders to objectively examine whether the blocking of access to a given structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany is lawful. When copyright holders submit an application, a review board examines whether the relevant requirements are met. If they are, the review board then recommends a DNS-block of the structurally copyright-infringing website in question. Every recommendation of the review committee must be unanimous and only apply to clear cases of copyright infringement. The recommendation is then forwarded to the German Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railways (Bundesnetzagentur - BNetzA). If the examination by the BNetzA does not reveal any concerns about the DNS-block according to the provisions of the EU Net Neutrality Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2015/2120), the CUII then informs the internet access providers and the applicants accordingly. In such cases, the internet access providers participating in the CUII then block the corresponding domains of the structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany.
related post by the same author, which mentions the current version of the website: https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up
> The CUII now only coordinates blocks between ISPs after a court order. That's it. No more secret votes. No more corporate censorship. The new version of their website says: "The CUII coordinates the conduct of judicial blocking proceedings and the implementation of judicial blocking orders."
ghurtado
Is it usually this easy for corporations to get you to believe they are the good guys?
aleph_minus_one
> Is it usually this easy for corporations to get you to believe they are the good guys?
I don't get your point.
What is written on the website of some company/organization/... when writing about itself, is what the respective company/organization/... wants you to believe about it. It should be trivial for you to recognize that what this company/organization/... wants you to believe about it can be very different from what you desire to find as truth about it.
It's like if I wrote: "aleph_minus_one is the greatest human that ever lived on earth." Do you now seriously believe that just because I wrote this about myself, it must be the truth?! :-)
hulitu
Yes. They vote with their (lobby) money almost every day, unless you, who votes with a pencil, every four years.
_alternator_
The title is misleading. They didn’t block the author’s site’s DNS. They blocked their own site’s DNS to figure out how the author’s site determines their DNS blacklist. Then they changed strategy.
vorgol
A bit like "There used to be a lot of corruption is politics. There still is, but there also used to be."
layer8
Note that the CUII blocking process is now based on court orders instead of arbitrary corporate decisions: https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up
JBiserkov
> Sadly, there's a small catch: the old blocks stay.
ycombinatrix
Not true. The article you linked states that the current nefarious block list still exists, it just isn't growing any more.
Lerc
How can they tell the difference between the CUII giving up and the CUII just saying that they have given up once they successfully found a way to conceal the blocks from the people checking?
ghurtado
[flagged]
layer8
Both the submitted article and the above link are from the same blog and author, just five months apart. I was pointing out the newer blog post containing updated information. It also indicates a success of the author’s activism, which is to be welcomed.
ghurtado
Thank you for clarifying.
Jolter
Doctor have any evidence that the claim is false?
mrtksn
Traditionally in the west, censorship was through copyright rights. It wasn’t considered censorship if you do it for money and business.
Fast forward to today, Americans are pushing you for self censorship through force and denial(if you don’t speak in line with the admin, you will have hard time in your US public sector job or if you want to travel to US) and Europeans find all kind of other ways.
Tough new world order. I used to be advocating for resolution through legal/political means, but now I'm inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control. Nobody wants loose ends. Everyone is terrified of some group of people will do something to them, freedom is out of fashion and those claiming otherwise want freedom for themselves only. The guy who says want to make humans interplanetary species is posing with people detained for traveling on the planet without permission. Just forget about it.
So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.
sunshine-o
> I used to be advocating for resolution through legal means, but now I inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control.
I came to a similar conclusion, what happened in the 90s and early 2000s is since the govs had restricted freedom in the physical/real world a lot of young people took refuge in the Internet.
It became harder for an individual to build his own house or start a business, but you could make a website pretty much free from regulations and impediments.
But governments and a lot of interested parties slowly invested the Internet and now we are complaining it sucks. The common Internet and web suck anyway now because it is full of bots, AI generated content, hard to search and you need to prove you are a human every 5 minutes.
We need to create new networks and places just because it is fun and it will take some time for the govs to follow us there: freenet, yggdrasil, alfis, gemini, reticulum, B.A.T.M.A.N, etc.
TomLisankie
I'll have to check out gemini again sometime. I tried it out a couple of years ago and really liked how it had that wild west feel of the old-web.
drfridg
I’m in the U.S. and am not aligned with what’s happening to freedom.
Taking a step back, I support the ideals (the good ones at least) of what I’d perceived that our country was founded on. I also support the individual people in our police and military, but not the fascist orders that they’re having to fulfill. I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general, I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.
This is a predicament, because it’s like you’re driving the bus and a fascist jumps into your lap with a gun to your head and takes the wheel, while he has others put guns to the head of your family and others on the bus. No one asked for this, and I still feel like there are many that believe that there is nothing we can do and that it will take care of itself. But the gerrymandering law that just passed in Texas, on top of everything else that was already in place, is another warning that this won’t go away on its own.
I get what you’re saying about sending people to space, but I think that being able to get off our big rock if we can do so without destroying other life and other places in the universe is worth time and effort. Even natives that lived with the land and life that existed had to move sometimes, life and all that exists physically that has space is to some degree nomadic.
Dumblydorr
I doubt a lot of the individuals doing these actions, like police or ICE, don’t believe in this. They signed up for these jobs, and votes last year show many of them heartily endorse and believe in these policies.
acdha
The national guard, though, probably didn’t sign up to be the backdrop for political ads and a lot of FBI, DEA, etc. agents signed up to work on major crimes rather than busting someone’s landscaper.
TomLisankie
> I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.
Check out "Ordinary Men" by Christopher R. Browning.
GLdRH
[flagged]
PartiallyTyped
I’d caution against taking simplistic views and recommend peaking behind the veil.
Id start by looking into the deportees, people like Abreco Garcia — working men and women who contributed to their society, and all those who received pardons — between rapists, violent criminals, and abusers, you’d have a hard time replacing many of the deportees.
snickerdoodle12
> I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general
Ha.
zosima
Copyright is not censorship.
Censorship is state/company mandated retraction or blockage of certain information. Copyright is state/company mandated blocking of certain forms of expression.
Copyright permits you to publish any idea you so desire, only that you don't plagiarize someone else while doing so. (Which is always possible, as the fair-use doctrine is a thing)
dragonwriter
> Copyright is not censorship.
Copyright law is absolutely a justification of and mechanism for censorship.
It may arguably be socially beneficial censorship, but then that's what is claimed by proponents of every basis and means of censorship.
mrtksn
Copyright is definitely not censorship, Copyright is the framework implemented to create intellectual properties to allow for commercial exploitation of text, sound, images and some other intellectual output(details depend on jurisdiction).
Removal of content due to copyrights is censorship, you are being denied to spread or consume certain content. It's not different than defining that some content is protected with "national security" or however else you define it and then prevent the spread and consumption of it. Same thing, different excuse.
You can use placeholders to see it more clearly, i.e. "This content is X therefore in accordance to the law needs to be removed, failure to do so may lead to prosecution and penalties of Y"
You can replace X with anything, including "copyrighted material", "support for Hamas terrorism", "hate speech", "defamation of our glorious leader","communist propaganda", "capitalist propaganda", "self harm".
fastball
Is the removal of any content for any reason "censorship"? I don't think that fits conventional usage of the term, and broadening the scope of the word to that level removes much of its usefulness.
If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
mtsr
Interesting point. There’s wide acceptance of commercial censorship, but censorship for the common good (rightfully) feels like a slippery slope. But are they actually so different? Couldn’t the latter be done in a way just as purposeful? Or does it always lead to loss of freedom disproportional to its goals?
mrtksn
I don't think that there's difference, just implementation details differ. Youtube was blocked in Turkey for many years because someone from Germany uploaded defamatory videos about Ataturk(illegal in TR) and it was considered protected speech and Germany & Google refused deleting those. The situation was resolved when someone copyrighted Ataturk in Germany and made Youtube remove these videos.
Besides copyright, especially among Americans, I find that its completely O.K. to censor content it is bad for business. A major one is censorship in order to be advertisement friendly but anything flies, even the guy owns the thing and can do whatever he pleases is good enough for many(slightly controversial).
mannykannot
This is a myth: in Germany, as in many other countries, copyright covers only specific expression; you cannot copyright either the name of a historical person or a topic of discourse. The videos were briefly taken down as an automatic response to a complaint, but it seems the complaint was not upheld and the videos were restored.
At the time, Germany had a law censoring insulting comments about foreign heads of state, but that only applied to living ones (and maybe only those in office at the time?) That law was repealed in 2018.
The videos remained blocked in Turkey, but on account of a specific law banning criticism of Ataturk, not copyright.
dw64
We do accept „censorship“ if it follows due process based on clear and well-intended laws. Think taking down piracy sites, child porn, slander.
But CUII is formed by a private oligopoly, with anonymous judges, implementing vague rules, trying to keep secret even what they block. All while limiting what the vast majority of Germans (who don’t know what DNS is) can access on the internet. IMO that’s the issue.
buran77
What about all the propaganda sites you like?
Would you ban all propaganda? Russian propaganda? Propaganda from countries engaged in illegal wars? How many social media or news sites survive? Heck, how many sites that allow comments and user interaction survive?
Yours is the "think of the children" argument, makes you feel warm and fuzzy when it aligns with your interests but you won't have a leg to stand on by the time it's used against you. Banning is just sweeping some of the trash under the carpet. The ones wielding the ban hammer don't care that most of the trash is still out in the open (social media?), they just need to open the door to arbitrary banning. The ones applauding the ban hammer are lacking the same critical thing that would otherwise handle propaganda and misinformation very well: education.
If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack on a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.
Meanwhile all the RT type crap is flooding social media under thousands of names. But that's fine as long as enough rubes are tricked into thinking banning one site did anything to solve the propaganda issue.
mtsr
It’s just not as black-and-white as you say. Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom in my country and the EU on a daily basis. Should we invest in education (that is generally already reasonably good, IIUC)? Should we leave it to commercial journalism, even the best of which are moving to clickbait headlines? Should we do nothing?
cowboylowrez
>door to arbitrary banning
lol the US has had that door removed
squigz
> If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack in a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.
> just
So... you do both?
Xelbair
I see no way to have censorship and freedom and common good at the same time, so good of society is out of question - unless you don't value freedom at all.
It is a tool that entrenches current powers that be, system wise. Who decides what the "common" good is? the one in power.
It also hides societal problems and signals that could be used for policymaking.
The acceptance of censorship honestly scares me, and i grew up on stories of oppressive communist regime - full of censorship, secret police etc.
and frankly, commercial censorship might be even worse - it is a "for profit" enterprise, common good be damned.
and one last thing - even if you fully trust your current government, you're just one elections away from something vastly different. They will have access to the same powers that you've granted them(indirectly, by voting).
coffee_am
imho that is just silly ... I can see various ways censorship and freedom and common good at the same time. Actually, I can imagine different set ups where this could work...
But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?
On the other topic, I for one think that censorship of AI generated content and fake news, as well as AI generated ordering of results should be censored. But it's not that easy, and implementing that is an even bigger can of worms.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
What is censorship for the "common" good? The point being that censorship is a top-down thing; it is not a "common" thing by definition.
FirmwareBurner
Definition of Common good is doing what the political establishment sees as good for preserving their power.
It's not what's good for you, it's what's good for them.
JeremyNT
> So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.
It's tough to imagine what this might look like. I suspect it's too late.
Device attestation is becoming more prevalent, and required for increasingly more functionality. Passkeys are breathing down our necks.
Alternate protocols can only exist if the corporate and governmental powers look the other way. We have Signal and VPNs and BitTorrent and tor, but for how long?
And moreover, does it even matter what protocols we want to use, if most of us use devices that are fully controlled by the tech giants who want to do the censorship?
glenstein
I don't know if there are particular good ground-level solutions to infrastructure (mesh networks can have their application but are difficult to drive critical mass adoption and every square inch of mesh network has "last mile" problems).
Ideally you would have good government involvement to enforce traffic neutrality, but that's out the door. I'm sure this has been talked to death but ground level P2P infrastructure is what I would be rooting for.
Thorrez
>Traditionally in the west censorship was through copyright rights. It wasn’t considered censorship if you do it for money and business.
To me, those 2 sentences contradict each other. Doing it through copyright rights, and doing it for money and business sound pretty much the same to me. But you're saying that traditionally one wasn't considered censorship, but the other was considered censorship.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
They are saying that it is censorship, it just largely wasn't (and isn't) considered such.
null
FirmwareBurner
[flagged]
tomp
[flagged]
CyberDildonics
Calling someone who buys a platform and amplifies nazis, white nationalists and groups while sequestering marginalized groups of people free speech is basically 1984 double speak.
Calling people from other countries "savages from primitive cultures" is textbook hardcore racism.
tomp
[flagged]
zoobab
More censorship is a good inventive to build really uncensorable protocols that ISPs can't mess with.
mzajc
These protocols or revisions already exist - DNSSEC at the site level and DoT/DoH at the user level prevent this kind of malicious tampering with responses by the ISP.
The issue is that they're not commonly used, and even if that changes, the ISPs can roll out harder-to-bypass censorship methods like SNI inspection or IP blocks.
jeroenhd
SNI blocking will hopefully be harder now that Let's Encrypt is rolling out IP certificates, so ECH becomes viable for websites that don't share an IP address with known-good websites (like Cloudflare tunnels). IP blocks will be the only solution on the normal web.
For everything else, there's I2P and Tor.
ACCount37
And webmasters can, in turn, ramp up the adoption of QUIC, ECH, IPv6, or bury their frontend in some CDN that you can't feasibly "IP ban" without massive collateral damage.
You can't win the war against corporate censorship and malicious anti-freedom politicians through purely technical means. But you can sure make it much harder for them.
eskuero
> you can't feasibly "IP ban" without massive collateral damage.
Oh but they can, we are suffering this in Spain every weekend the football league plays.
Tons of Cloudflare IPs sent to a blackhole regardless of how many other non relevant websites are behind.
Buttons840
Imagine if the radios we all carry with us everywhere could be programmed to communicate with each other.
(I'm not sure why I replied here. I guess I'm saying that establishing some kind of mesh network protocol between all cellphones would be a great addition to those other protocols you mentioned.)
ratorx
These don’t prevent censorship necessarily, they will give you a way to detect it at best.
DNSSEC gives you the ability to verify the DNS response. It doesn’t protect against a straight up packet sniffer or ISP tampering, it just allows you to detect that it has happened.
DoT/DoH are better, they will guarantee you receive the response the resolver wanted you to. And this will prevent ISP-level blocks. But the government can just pressure public resolvers to enact the changes at the public resolver level (as they are now doing in certain European countries).
You can use your own recursive, and this will actually circumvent most censorship (but not hijacking).
Hijacking is actually quite rare. ISPs are usually implementing the blocks at their resolver (or the government is mandating that public resolvers do). To actually block things more predictably, SNI is already very prevalent and generally a better ROI (because you need to have a packet sniffer to do either).
jeroenhd
DNSSEC itself won't help you alone, but the combination of DNSSEC + ODoH/DoT will. Without DNSSEC, your (O)DoH/DoT server can mess with the DNS results as much as your ISP could.
Of course you will need to configure your DNS server/client to do local validation for this, and at most it'll prevent you from falling for scams or other domain foolery.
uyzstvqs
The protocols already exist. Deploy an I2P router for an effective darknet on the internet, or set up Yggdrasil for a next-generation decentralized & private internet alternative.
An even easier start, just set up unfiltered encrypted DNS on your devices. E.g. Njalla DNS or Mullvad DNS. Or get a good VPN such as Mullvad.
At the same time, keep voting for privacy. And send letters to your politicians!
tliltocatl
Ultimately it all ends on the physical layer. Those who control the physical layer can always suppress communication if they choose so. The only protocol ISP can't mess with is having an army big enough (and somehow the commanders of that army has to be motivated not to mess with the protocol for their own purposes).
oblio
It's great to have alternatives but in practice those don't really get adoption (until a catastrophe has already happened) and during regular times their usage tends to put a target on your back.
FirmwareBurner
No, more censorship is a reason to vote better governments not to find workaround while accepting tyranny.
2716057
The workarounds on this page mostly suggest to use large public resolvers. Feature request (not sure if the author is on HN): it would be interesting to know which domains are blocked by 9.9.9.9, 1.1.1.1, and especially the new DNS4EU service.
p2detar
Thanks so much for this. I never heard about DNS4EU before.
throw28158916
Sadly dns4eu does not support dnscrypt protocol which is deal-breaker in 2025 if you ask me.
rfl890
Why isn't DoT sufficient?
nicce
Few years ago I would have been happy about such a service in EU level. Now I just fear how they are planning to misuse it.
hk1337
Initially, this will be used exactly as intended and therefore seen as good. After about ~10 years it will include other "objectionable" material and a good case will be made for it so most people will not necessarily realize it.
GardenLetter27
Germany is so backward in stuff like this, skilled engineers should just move to the free world and leave them with their insolvent pensions.
yladiz
Define free world.
GLdRH
That's already happening
yogorenapan
Where is the free world? Certainly not the US with Trump around.
ballenf
When domains are seized, does the new "owner" pay the registration renewals? If so, what's to stop someone from doing this:
- create a vanity TLD with high renewal fees
- register a bunch of sites that are mirrors of already seized domains
- mention them in enough places they get noticed
- ???
- profit
tiagod
These domains aren't being seized, they are being blocked. In this case, as per TFA, they're just overriding the domain nameserver at the ISP default DNS server.
Even if they were actually seized, do you think if the police seize a rental car they'll be paying the rental fee until they give it back?
GuB-42
Seizing a domain probably costs way more in procedures than any renewal fees.
Also, blocking websites typically doesn't involve ICANN, the infringing website still owns the domain. They just order ISPs in the country to lie on some DNS queries, which is the reason why such blocks are so easy to work around.
asdfaoeu
I don't think governments seizing domains are paying anything.
ascorbic
Step 1 there is a bit of a "draw the rest of the owl"
null
elashri
These stories and the stories about going after people who are torrenting in much more aggressive manner make my puzzle by Proton decision to relocate to Germany from Switzerland over some proposed law. I understand that it would make it harder to operate with protecting privacy but I would wonder why relocating to Germany, what would the Swiss government do that would be worse than the current situation in Germany?
I did not go though the details of the proposed Swiss law to be honest so it might be obvious why they are doing that but still why Germany instead of some other place (like Mullvad being in Sweden) ?
IFC_LLC
What options are there? Do we have a reliable distributed DNS? I'm genuinely asking, because I've just realized that for the past 7 years I've been happily using my provider's DNS server and never thought of it.
But now, I'm seriously considering something better than that.
flerchin
So this entire censorship scheme is bypassed by using 8.8.8.8 or the like?
Henchman21
What about simply running ‘unbound’ yourself?
> In Germany, we have the Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (CUII) - literally 'Copyright Clearinghouse for the Internet', a private organization that decides what websites to block, corporate interests rewriting our free internet. No judges, no transparency, just a bunch of ISPs and major copyright holders deciding what your eyes can see.
I'm confused because CUII at:
https://cuii.info/en/about-us/
says (translated):
> The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.
CUII is saying that they enforce court orders. I guess that language doesn't preclude them from also blocking other sites.