For more than 15 years, site blocking in the UK has been driven almost entirely by familiar names in the broadband market. BT, Virgin Media, Sky, TalkTalk, EE and Plusnet have routinely complied with High Court orders requested by the Motion Picture Association, blackholing hundreds of domains used for streaming and torrenting. These so-called “no fault” injunctions long ago stopped being adversarial, with ISPs simply agreeing in advance not to contest them.
This latest blocking wave, which came into force yesterday, targets close to 200 domains tied to well-known pirate brands such as 123movies, fmovies, soap2day, hurawatch, sflix and onionplay. While the legal authority behind the order hasn’t been explicitly stated, past patterns make it obvious. The MPA’s Hollywood studios asked the High Court in London for an extension of an existing dynamic injunction.
Dynamic injunctions are a neat but opaque trick. A court-approved list of domains is blocked initially, but the rights holders can then quietly add related sites without public scrutiny. This secrecy has left even seasoned observers guessing which original order is still being extended. One likely candidate is a December 2022 ruling targeting some of the same brands.
What makes this round different is Cloudflare’s direct involvement. Users trying to access the newly blocked sites are now greeted by a Cloudflare legal notice, which oddly links to a takedown order originally sent to Google. Those notices were part of a voluntary deal where Google agreed to deindex piracy domains if provided with a court order. Cloudflare usually submits its own notices to the Lumen transparency database, but according to TorrentFreak no such record exists.
“Domains blocked by Sky, BPI and others don’t appear to be affected. The majority if not all trigger malware warnings of a very serious kind, either immediately upon visiting the sites, or shortly after,” the report said.
For now, it’s unclear why Cloudflare is enforcing a UK order so visibly, or why it’s pointing to Google’s notice rather than its own. However, with it involved users will find it harder to dodge the blocks without abandoning those sites entirely.
