In the last 24 hours, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch (ICE) have seized several domains belonging to major streaming websites, most of which focused on sports. The following 10 domains were taken down: atdhe.net, channelsurfing.net, firstrow.net, hq-streams.com, hq-streams.net, ilemi.com, iilemi.net, iilemii.com, rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org. TorrentFreak called the move a "Super Bowl Crackdown" (this year's games begin on February 6, 2011).
The only connection that these sites have to the US appears to be that they are operated by American companies. This is only a temporary setback, as all the owners of the above sites are determined to continue their services. They have simply started moving their operations to alternative domains, since the actual servers are still intact. It has already begun: rojadirecta.com is now available at rojadirecta.es, channelsurfing.net is now at channelsurf.eu, atdhe.net has moved to atdhenet.tv, and ilemi.com has transferred over to Ilemi.tv.
Three months ago, the the DOJ and ICE seized 77 piracy and counterfeit domains. While this seizure doesn't appear (we don't know the full scope) to be as large, it's still quite significant given how popular some of these websites were. Has your browsing behavior been affected?