26 October

When a website will not load for you, one possible reason is that your internet provider has stopped the internet's phone book (DNS) from returning the address of the server behind it. On 26 October 2011, the chair of the US House Judiciary Committee introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), under which an internet provider served with a court order was to take measures within 5 days, or within a period set by the court, including stopping the domain name of a foreign infringing site from resolving. In January 2012 the chair announced plans to remove the DNS blocking provision, Wikipedia went dark for 24 hours in protest, and the committee later put off action on the bill. In Asia, Singapore's Copyright Act 2021 lets the High Court order a network connection provider to take reasonable steps to disable access to a flagrantly infringing online location, while according to a Japanese government anti-piracy plan, reissued in August 2026, legislation on blocking will be considered in light of how other measures work and the extent of the damage, and we found no provision in Taiwan's Copyright Act, as amended in June 2022, that lets rights holders seek site blocking (we did not look into blocking on other grounds). If a site will not load on your network, the Web Connectivity test in OONI Probe, the app from OONI (Open Observatory of Network Interference), can separate DNS, connection and page-content anomalies, though an anomaly does not always mean blocking, and according to OONI's FAQ, running the app can potentially be risky depending on your threat model and the country.