Europe Planning A DNS Infrastructure With Built-In Filtering

Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for The Record, has found that the European Union wants to build a recursive DNS service that will be available to EU institutions and the European public. The reasons for building the service are manifold, including concerns that American DNS providers are not GDPR compliant and worries that much of Europe is dependent on (largely) American-based or -owned infrastructure.

As part of the European system, plans are for it to:

… come with built-in filtering capabilities that will be able to block DNS name resolutions for bad domains, such as those hosting malware, phishing sites, or other cybersecurity threats.

This filtering capability would be built using threat intelligence feeds provided by trusted partners, such as national CERT teams, and could be used to defend organizations across Europe from common malicious threats.

It is unclear if DNS4EU usage would be mandatory for all EU or national government organizations, but if so, it would grant organizations like CERT-EU more power and the agility it needs to block cyber-attacks as soon as they are detected.

In addition, EU officials also want to use DNS4EU’s filtering system to also block access to other types of prohibited content, which they say could be done based on court orders. While officials didn’t go into details, this most likely refers to domains showing child sexual abuse materials and copyright-infringing (pirated) content.¹

By integrating censorship/blocking provisions as the policy level of the European DNS, there is a real risk that over time that same system might be used for untoward ends. Consider the rise of anti-LGBTQ laws in Hungary and Poland, and how those governments mights be motivated to block access to ‘prohibited content’ that is identified as such by anti-LGBTQ politicians.

While a reader might hope that the European courts could knock down these kinds of laws, their recurrence alone raises the spectre that content that is deemed socially undesirable by parties in power could be censored, even where there are legitimate human rights grounds that justify accessing the material in question.