Registrar of ‘Torrentz2.eu’ Suspended the Domain Following Order

• The EURid registrar has suspended the main domain of the ‘Torrentz2’ platform.
• Torrentz2 now continues with its Icelandic domain, and the community shifted there promptly.
• The EURid is trusted by other pirating platforms too, but this may soon change for everyone.

The main domain of the popular torrent indexer, ‘Torrentz2.eu’, has been suspended by the EURid registry service. The latter hasn’t provided many details about the action, but the explanation given in the WHOIS report is that the domain is “under investigation.” The operator of the website announced that the Public Prosecutor has issued a relevant order and handed it over to EURid. There is no information about which country’s prosecution office has moved against Torrentz2 and the jurisdiction details for this action. For now, people who still want to access Torrentz2 may do so via the ‘Torrentz2.is,’ a domain that is managed by the Icelandic ISNIC registry.

Torrentz2 launched in August 2016 as an unofficial continuation of the original “Torrentz” that abruptly and inexplicably shut down. While the original was based in Finland, the spiritual successor wasn’t so open in revealing its location. This didn’t stop the torrent meta-search platform from becoming one of the most popular and widely used in the field, as it was almost immediately populated with 60 million torrents. Certainly, using the same theme and familiar interface helped a lot on that part. Last September, Torrentz2 added Google to its indexing, bringing along another 82 million torrent hashes, and becoming one of the most complete torrent indexing sites out there.

Still, Torrentz2 listed mostly pirated content, and thus, it is considered a facilitator and enabler of copyright infringement offenses. That’s why it’s blocked in many countries and by numerous ISPs - and very possibly why legal action has been taken against it now. Of course, these platforms always maintain redundancy, so suspending a domain isn’t wiping them from the face of the Earth. Instead, these blocking actions merely cause a disruption. At the start of the month, we covered a similar case that placed ‘BTDB.io’ on a “server hold” status. The community moved to the ‘BTDB.eu’ which hasn’t been suspended yet. Maybe the recent action from EURid will force BTDB to reconsider their decision to move there.

EURid is a non-profit organization appointed by the EU Commission as the domain name registry that operates the “.eu” top-level domain. Thus, it would be naive to expect them to leave pirating platforms alone. The news section of the EURid official portal has a very interesting piece on the collaboration of the registrar with EUIPO (European Union Intellectual Property Office), dating in May 2020. This was purported to focus on trademarks, but it could be related to more than just that.