The European Union is considering developing its own DNS resolver. Objective: to extricate itself from American domination and guarantee the use in Europe of a tool that complies with local legislation. But some are already talking about a risk of censorship.
The European Union’s crusade against piracy continues. This time, the objective is to kill two birds with one stone and take advantage of this to get out of the American domination of the tools dedicated to this problem. The European Commission has thus mentioned the start of construction of a sovereign DNS resolver. Project code name: DNS4EU.
As a reminder, the DNS resolver is the server queried by the terminal machines, that is to say those that we use on a day-to-day basis. It matches the sites domain name to an IP address, so that a website or service can be easily located. It is a kind of “Internet directory”. It is often he who is at fault when several sites suddenly go down.
A device designed for European laws
The catch, according to the Commission, is that many of the most popular third-party DNS services, such as Google, Cloudflare, OpenDNS or Norton, are based in the United States. “The deployment of DNS4EU aims to remedy this consolidation of DNS resolution in the hands of a few companies, which leaves the resolution process itself vulnerable in the event of significant events affecting a major supplier”, can we read in the report.
For the EU, “lack of significant investment” in this area also hinders “the development of infrastructures favoring the detection and filtering of local cyber threats which could have significant socio-economic repercussions”. Finally, the third argument raised concerns the right to privacy and data protection, since DNS resolution includes a risk of data collection that would violate the GDPR.
DNS4EU is therefore designed to offer “data and privacy protection in accordance with EU rules, ensuring DNS resolution data is processed in Europe and personal data is not monetized”. The European system would also contribute to the blocking of malware and the fight against phishing and other cybersecurity threats.
A project as risky as it is ineffective?
Without going much further into the details, the Commission note finally mentions the blocking of “illegal content” based on EU and country regulations on a case-by-case basis. An aspect that should interest Arcom, the new audiovisual policeman, for whom the fight against piracy will be one of the most burning issues to manage in the months to come. With DNS4EU, one could therefore imagine a blocking of several sites by court order, and this for all Internet users in the same area.
It is precisely this point that worries some defenders of freedom of expression. Asked by the site TorrentFreak, MEP Patrick Breyer, of the Pirate Party, believes that such a system managed by governments is necessarily accompanied by a “risk of online censorship”. For him, the existing DNS solutions are sufficient in themselves – while not always being as infallible as the Commission seems to think, since DNS blocks are easily circumvented.
“Blocking access leaves the content online and can therefore be easily circumvented. This often results in overblocking and collateral deletion of legal speech hosted on the same website, by the same provider, or through the same network.” And the congressman cites an incident from 2020, when Project Gutenberg’s digital library was blocked in its entirety because some content violated local law. According to him, it would rather be a matter of purely and simply removing the illegal content in order to avoid this risk.