<
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/cloudflare-may-pull-servers-out-of-italy-over-order-that-it-block-pirate-sites/>
"Italy fined Cloudflare 14.2 million euros for refusing to block access to
pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, the country’s communications
regulatory agency, AGCOM, announced yesterday. Cloudflare said it will fight
the penalty and threatened to remove all of its servers from Italian cities.
AGCOM issued the fine under Italy’s controversial Piracy Shield law, saying
that Cloudflare was required to disable DNS resolution of domain names and
routing of traffic to IP addresses reported by copyright holders. The law
provides for fines up to 2 percent of a company’s annual turnover, and the
agency said it applied a fine equal to 1 percent.
The fine relates to a blocking order issued to Cloudflare in February 2025.
Cloudflare argued that installing a filter applying to the roughly 200 billion
daily requests to its DNS system would significantly increase latency and
negatively affect DNS resolution for sites that aren’t subject to the dispute
over piracy.
AGCOM rejected Cloudflare’s arguments. The agency said the required blocking
would impose no risk on legitimate websites because the targeted IP addresses
were all uniquely intended for copyright infringement.
In a September 2025 report on Piracy Shield, researchers said they found
“hundreds of legitimate websites unknowingly affected by blocking, unknown
operators experiencing service disruption, and illegal streamers continuing to
evade enforcement by exploiting the abundance of address space online, leaving
behind unusable and polluted address ranges.” This is “a conservative
lower-bound estimate,” the report said.
The Piracy Shield law was adopted in 2024. “To effectively tackle live sports
piracy, its broad blocking powers aim to block piracy-related domain names and
IP addresses within 30 minutes,”
TorrentFreak wrote in an article today about
the Cloudflare fine."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
