> In Germany, we have the Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (CUII) - literally 'Copyright Clearinghouse for the Internet', a private organization that decides what websites to block, corporate interests rewriting our free internet. No judges, no transparency, just a bunch of ISPs and major copyright holders deciding what your eyes can see.

I'm confused because CUII at:

https://cuii.info/en/about-us/

says (translated):

> The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.

CUII is saying that they enforce court orders. I guess that language doesn't preclude them from also blocking other sites.

the blog post was written before the page was changed

https://web.archive.org/web/20250130115412/https://cuii.info... said

> The Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet (CUII) is an independent body in Germany. It was founded by German internet access providers and copyright holders to objectively examine whether the blocking of access to a given structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany is lawful. When copyright holders submit an application, a review board examines whether the relevant requirements are met. If they are, the review board then recommends a DNS-block of the structurally copyright-infringing website in question. Every recommendation of the review committee must be unanimous and only apply to clear cases of copyright infringement. The recommendation is then forwarded to the German Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railways (Bundesnetzagentur - BNetzA). If the examination by the BNetzA does not reveal any concerns about the DNS-block according to the provisions of the EU Net Neutrality Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2015/2120), the CUII then informs the internet access providers and the applicants accordingly. In such cases, the internet access providers participating in the CUII then block the corresponding domains of the structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany.

related post by the same author, which mentions the current version of the website: https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up

> The CUII now only coordinates blocks between ISPs after a court order. That's it. No more secret votes. No more corporate censorship. The new version of their website says: "The CUII coordinates the conduct of judicial blocking proceedings and the implementation of judicial blocking orders."

The blogpost is from February, since then, the CUII switched from arbitrarily decide on blocks through an internal group "until the court order arrives" to strictly include the domains from court orders.

So yes, they USED to just block whenever they wanted, based on "previous similar cases" but without a court order (or a pending one). They then got a lot of flak from the regulatory bodies and switched to actually only include court ordered blocks.

A bit like "There used to be a lot of corruption is politics. There still is, but there also used to be."

The title is misleading. They didn’t block the author’s site’s DNS. They blocked their own site’s DNS to figure out how the author’s site determines their DNS blacklist. Then they changed strategy.

I think the rules change just a few weeks ago so that they now always require court orders. That was not the case before.

Still I would heavily recommend to just use a non-german DNS service.