The Israel Internet Association (ISOC-IL) is proud to celebrate the new academic research publication by our VP of Research and Public Policy, Dr. Asaf Wiener, in the Routledge Handbook of Social Media, Law and Society.
The article, titled “Accountability and Regulation of Digital Speech Infrastructures in the EU and Beyond”, examines how the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) regulates social media platforms and how that regulation interacts with the deeper, often invisible layers of internet infrastructure.
By unpacking the DSA’s layered approach and applying a systems-thinking lens, the article offers lawmakers, regulators, and civil society a structured way to think about who should do what in online governance. The goal is not to abandon content moderation, but to ensure that in our urgency to address online harms, we do not quietly sacrifice the neutrality of the infrastructure that keeps the internet open, interoperable, and resilient.
Abstract and Key Arguments:
Legal scholars, activists, and policymakers broadly agree today that social media platforms must moderate content by removing illegal material, mitigating harm, and being transparent about their decisions. The problem, Dr. Wiener shows, is that public and political expectations increasingly “leak” downward. Infrastructure services—such as transit providers, CDNs, domain registries, and DNS resolvers—are being pressured to behave like content platforms, even though they were historically understood as neutral intermediaries and are not technically positioned to judge or control content in the same way.
On paper, the DSA actually offers a helpful layered framework, distinguishing between:
- Mere conduits (e.g., internet exchange points, VPNs, DNS services, registries)
- Caching services
- Hosting services
- Online platforms
- Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs)
The heavier duties—risk assessments, notice-and-action systems, and other content-moderation obligations—are rightly placed on platforms and VLOPs, where user-generated content is created, organized, and amplified.
The new article takes this taxonomy and builds on it, mapping the technologies that sit underneath social media and to clarify what role each layer can realistically play in content governance. His argument is not that the DSA is inherently overreaching, but that practice and expectations often fail to respect the distinctions the DSA itself makes. That failure is precisely what threatens neutrality and technical functionality deeper in the stack.
A central case study in the article focuses on the Domain Name System (DNS)—the distributed “phone book” of the internet. DNS translates human-readable names (like example.com) into numeric IP addresses so traffic can be routed. This ecosystem includes Root servers and TLD registries (e.g., .com, .eu), Registrars (e.g., GoDaddy, Google Domains), who sell domain names, and Recursive resolvers (e.g., Quad9, Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1), which answer users’ queries and cache the results.
These actors operate at a technical distance from the content itself. They don’t host the websites or decide what appears on them—but because they sit at crucial control points, they can be used to make content harder or impossible to reach. That has made DNS a tempting target for those seeking quick solutions to online harms.
Daily Stormer: When Infrastructure Steps In
The de-platforming of the Daily Stormer website in 2017 marked a turning point. After the site published content celebrating the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, infrastructure providers such as GoDaddy and later Google Domains terminated its domain registration and related services.
These actions were widely applauded as a stand against hate speech—but they also showed that domain name infrastructure can and will be used as a lever of content control. The story we used to tell—that infrastructure layers are purely neutral and untouched by moderation debates—no longer reflects reality. As more such cases accumulate, expectations shift: people begin to assume that if platforms act against harmful content, lower layers should too.
Dr. Wiener’s article highlights the risks of this shift: opaque policies, ad hoc decisions, and private companies making far-reaching judgments about speech without clear due process. At the same time, simply insisting on absolute neutrality ignores growing public concern about real harms online. The challenge is to recalibrate responsibilities without collapsing all layers into one amorphous “content police.”
The Quad9 vs. Sony Music case in Germany further crystallizes this dilemma. Sony sought an injunction compelling Quad9, a non-profit DNS resolver, to block access to a domain associated with copyright infringement. The Hamburg courts initially accepted this approach, effectively treating a DNS resolver as if it were close enough to the content to bear “interference liability” (Störerhaftung).
Such reasoning, Dr. Wiener notes, ignores the technical role of DNS. If resolvers and similar intermediaries are routinely ordered to block content, they cease to be neutral access providers and become quasi-censors—despite never hosting or curating the material in question.
In late 2023, the Higher Regional Court in Dresden reversed course, ruling in favor of Quad9 and affirming that a DNS resolver does not play a central role in the publication of copyrighted material and should benefit from access-provider-style liability protections. This dramatic decision reinforces the idea that DNS services must remain neutral intermediaries, and if copyright is to be enforced, it should be enforced primarily against actors closer to the content.
Taken together, these and other case studies show how net neutrality and infrastructure neutrality are being eroded in practice, even as frameworks like the DSA offer tools to preserve them. Social media platforms are rightly expected to moderate content—but conduits and intermediaries are not platforms, and both courts and companies should be cautious not to treat them as such.
Dr. Wiener’s article argues that each layer of the internet must be evaluated in its own technical and legal context. We may decide, as a society, to impose new duties on some layers—but that should be done transparently, with a clear understanding of capabilities and consequences, rather than through ad hoc pressure and blurred categories.