ISP Website Blocking

Comments discuss governments and courts ordering ISPs to block access to sites like torrent and porn platforms, often via DNS or IP level, with talks on enforcement, bypass methods like alternative DNS, and examples from UK, India, and others.

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Keywords

NFT US www.iwf SSN org.uk mozilla.org DNS LE HN MAFIAA isps block isp dns blocking sites blocks uk blocked torrent

Sample Comments

baloki Sep 21, 2023 View on HN

They block your site at the ISP level. They’ve been doing that for years.They’d fine you as well but that’s probably less enforceable.

air3y Apr 30, 2025 View on HN

Probably the ISPs would be required to block a given list of domains, and they will do it at DNS requests. Porn sites and torrent sharing sites used to be blocked this way. Some ISPs wont even do it properly. A decade or more ago, when these were banned, I could circumvent it by simply moving to using encrypted dns protocol by running dnscrypt. It is rarely implemented with a zeal, unlike chinese GFW reportedly does.

emaro Nov 6, 2022 View on HN

There are plenty of instances who just block content that's illegal in their country. So you just could choose one of these.

that_guy_iain Nov 28, 2023 View on HN

Countries just tell ISPs they need to block ips. It's easy to bypass, see the pirate bay blocks.

bandushrew Dec 23, 2020 View on HN

The internet sees censorshop as damage, and routes around it.

icebraining Apr 11, 2018 View on HN

You could. And then you could get blocked by the ISPs after the courts order it.

ankit219 Jun 27, 2020 View on HN

There is more. Individual ISPs can ban or even slow down websites as per their own wishes. Airtel in india (which is about to raise an investment by Amazon) blocked a lot of websites like Streamable when it wasnt even legally banned. Just showed the error as address could not be found. I circumvented by changing my DNS to cloudflare and it started working. Jio totally blocked telegram with no directions from court or govt.

miohtama Jan 9, 2026 View on HN

The UK has blocked porn sites on ISP level for 15 years now, no court order needed AFAIK.

adamrezich Mar 19, 2019 View on HN

It's not mentioned in this article but from what I understand (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong), "blocking" is happening at the ISP DNS level, and anyone living in these affected areas can simply use a different DNS service to continue using these websites unimpeded.

londons_explore Aug 30, 2022 View on HN

Every ISP could also block these sites... Yet few do....