For those who (like me) missed the essential key word in the OP's title:<p>This ruling is about copyright, and seems mostly unrelated to recent conversations about escaping censorship and surveilance, and the overall final throes of the open web.<p>It's still pretty important since the lawsuit filed by the Anne Frank Fonds could be caricatured as "if this content is illegal in our country, it should not be on the Internet in other countries, because our citizens can still circumvent the publisher's geofence and access it" which would have wild consequences if that line of thought was applied.<p>But, still:<p>> At its core, the case forced Europe's top judges to answer a highly technical question: if a publisher actively tries to block visitors from a specific country, are they still breaking the law if a user sneaks past the digital border using circumvention software?<p>> According to the CJEU, the answer is no.<p>Could be conceived to have a tenuous link to the current debate on censorship, surveilance, etc.
Somewhat related to this same debate on censorship:<p>French regulators order block of Polymarket's website [0]<p>> The French gambling regulator said the site's continued availability constituted advertising. A ban on financial transactions to the site was already in place.<p>After failing to compel Polymarket to geoblock France, it's crazy that French "regulators" can just order ISPs to block a website without any judicial review just because the mere existence of it on the internet constitutes "advertising" to French people.<p>It seems like the EU in general is struggling badly with how to control internet access. Whether it's blocking VPNs, requiring access to private chats, or just blocking websites completely.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/07/17/france-blocks-access-to-polymarket_6755581_7.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/07/17/france-b...</a>
Without robust copyright protection, what will incentivize Anne Frank to write more diary entries?
Hopefully this ruling adds to some precedent in favour of VPNs to future court battles attacking VPNs for circumventing age verification.
Well, the EU courts will just follow suit the moment the legislation is changed. Today France did so - young people are disallowed from accessing antisocial media. The next step will be verification. Any parent not sniffing on their children will be put in jail. King Macron decreed this today. (He is such a small man though - all the small french, such as Napoleon, have a compensation-problem with regards to their rather insignificant height.)<p>Here is a copy/pasteable snippet for lazy lobbyists so someone pass this
to the lobby-judges at the EU courts:<p>"In light of recent changes to legislation and the deadly effect of social
media on babies and unborn ones, VPNs are agents of terrorism, attempting
to circumvent healthy restrictions pertaining to protecting such young folk
from the vile dangers of antisocial media consumption. Anyone attempting to
browse the web for information without presenting a valid unique ID including
biometric data is guilty of terrorism, facing a minimum penalty of 25 years
and 1.000.000€ fine."<p>This fight is, by the way, not just against VPNs. Age sniffing has never ever
only been about children or VPNs. Some people still think it is about "protecting
children". It's interesting.
Btw this also could come with negative consequences, like that they want to force id checks to access copyrighted material
The irony of trying to block content/visitors based on country, while publishing on a platform called the "World Wide" web. IP address blocks that roughly correspond with geographic regions is kind of a design flaw.
That's what happens when you have idealistic nerds implementing a vision of what they want , rather than the typical software that is designed and built almost like an representation of the organization that built it, i.e Conway's Law.
Is it a design or implementation flaw?
Yes, they may say that NOW, because the case is related to a silly copyright duration dispute between Belgium and the Netherlands. I wouldn't be surprised if they go against this in future cases where a VPN is used to download FIFA matches in 8k or something.
EU posts about it:<p><i>Copyright in the European Union and geo-blocking: a work that is in the public domain can be published online free of charge in a Member State even if it remains protected in another Member State</i> [pdf]<p><a href="https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/2026-07/cp260098en.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...</a><p>Other blog post:<p><i>CJEU clarifies when geo-blocking limits online copyright liability</i><p><a href="https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/cjeu-clarifies-when-geo-blocking-limits-online-copyright-liability-2026-07-14_en" rel="nofollow">https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/news-eve...</a>
Now watch the octogenarian UK lawmakers outlaw them anyway...right after they print the proposed law out because they don't do so well with computer stuff
That's good, but the lobbyists in the EU will continue to try
to destroy VPN. The "we must protect children" is the ruse they
are using right now. Everyone will have a unique ID in the future,
otherwise you will be unable to browse (at the least for commercial
systems such as Microsoft-based computer systems; I can not yet
predict how it will work for Linux but systemd already has that
field for your age: <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954</a> -
Poettering forbid further discussion about that issue too)
Landmark?<p>It's Europe.<p>#3.<p>Pareto puts them in the insignificant 80%.<p>Thanks Europe for the cookie message.
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