Cloudflare Refuses Italy’s Piracy Shield, Keeps DNS Unblocked
▼ Summary
– Italy’s AGCOM fined Cloudflare €14.2 million for refusing to block pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service under the Piracy Shield law.
– Cloudflare will fight the fine and has threatened to remove all its servers from Italy, arguing the required filter would harm its service.
– The fine, equal to 1% of potential turnover, was for non-compliance with a February 2025 blocking order targeting specific domains and IPs.
– AGCOM rejected Cloudflare’s technical concerns, stating the blocking posed no risk to legitimate websites.
– A 2025 research report found Piracy Shield had inadvertently blocked hundreds of legitimate sites while illegal streamers evaded enforcement.
Italy has imposed a significant fine of 14.2 million euros on the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare for its refusal to block access to alleged pirate websites through its public DNS resolver service, 1.1.1.1. The country’s communications regulator, AGCOM, announced the penalty, which Cloudflare has vowed to contest legally. In a strong response, the company indicated it might withdraw all its physical servers from Italian territory.
The fine stems from Italy’s Piracy Shield law, a contentious regulation enacted in 2024 designed to combat digital piracy, particularly of live sports events. The law grants authorities the power to order the blocking of specific domain names and IP addresses linked to copyright infringement within a very short timeframe. AGCOM stated that Cloudflare failed to comply with a blocking order issued in February 2025, which required the company to disable DNS resolution for certain targets. The penalty amounts to approximately one percent of Cloudflare’s annual turnover, utilizing a provision within the law that allows for fines up to two percent.
Cloudflare defended its position, arguing that implementing the required filtering on its global DNS system, which handles roughly 200 billion queries daily, would introduce substantial technical burdens. The company claimed such measures would significantly increase latency and degrade performance for all users, including those accessing completely legitimate websites that have no connection to piracy disputes. AGCOM dismissed these concerns, asserting that the targeted IP addresses were exclusively used for infringement and posed no risk to lawful online services.
However, independent research has raised serious questions about the Piracy Shield system’s accuracy and collateral damage. A September 2025 report highlighted that the blocking orders had inadvertently affected “hundreds of legitimate websites,” disrupted services for unknown operators, and failed to stop determined illegal streamers who simply shift to new online addresses. The researchers described their findings as a “conservative lower-bound estimate” of the problems, noting that the process leaves behind polluted and unusable ranges of IP addresses.
In a public statement, Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince confirmed the company’s intention to legally challenge both the fine and the foundational legal scheme itself. Prince emphasized that Cloudflare already had multiple pending legal challenges against the Piracy Shield system and would vigorously “fight the unjust fine.” This standoff underscores a broader global tension between national copyright enforcement measures and the technical integrity of core internet infrastructure, setting a precedent for how other jurisdictions might attempt to regulate global DNS providers.
(Source: Ars Technica)
