One week ago, the news site TorrentFreak reported that The Pirate Bay and nearly 20 other torrent and pirate sites were being blocked by Cogent Communications, an Internet backbone provider. The block had been in place for more than a week and appeared to “appl[y] to the company’s entire global network,” affecting customers of ISPs "from all over the world" that send traffic through Cogent.
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Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer yesterday confirmed to Ars that the company is complying with a court order issued recently in Spain. But The Pirate Bay was not the subject of the court order, Schaeffer also confirmed. Schaeffer would not say which site or sites the order was intended to block, but the incident demonstrates how court orders to block websites can have unintended effects. (We have not been able to track down the specific court order at this time.)
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Court orders to block websites are more commonly issued to residential ISPs that directly serve consumers, not Internet transit providers like Cogent. The backbone operators are “usually the last guys” to get such orders, which can have unpredictable effects at that layer of the network, said co-founder and CTO Don Bowman of Sandvine, which makes network management equipment.
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The Cogent situation is not the first such court order, but “it’s still early in this evolution, and it gives us concern that if these sorts of orders continue to multiply, it’s going to provide additional complexity and complication,” Kramer said. “We want to be proactive about it now to make sure these court orders don’t multiply in a problematic way.”
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