Cloudflare Appeals Piracy Shield Fine, Hopes To Kill Italy's Site-Blocking Law

Cloudflare is appealing a 14.2 million-euro fine from Italy for refusing to comply with its "Piracy Shield" law, which requires blocking access to websites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service within 30 minutes. The company argues the system lacks oversight, risks widespread overblocking, and could undermine core Internet infrastructure. Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin reports: Piracy Shield is "a misguided Italian regulatory scheme designed to protect large rightsholder interests at the expense of the broader Internet," Cloudflare said in a blog post this week. "After Cloudflare resisted registering for Piracy Shield and challenged it in court, the Italian communications regulator, AGCOM, fined Cloudflare... We appealed that fine on March 8, and we continue to challenge the legality of Piracy Shield itself." Cloudflare called the fine of 14.2 million euros ($16.4 million) "staggering." AGCOM issued the penalty in January 2026, saying Cloudflare flouted requirements to disable DNS resolution of domain names and routing of traffic to IP addresses reported by copyright holders.

Cloudflare had previously resisted a blocking order it received in February 2025, arguing that it would require installing a filter on DNS requests that would raise latency and negatively affect DNS resolution for sites that aren't subject to the dispute over piracy. Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said that censoring the 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver would force the firm "not just to censor the content in Italy but globally."

Piracy Shield was designed to combat pirated streams of live sports events, requiring network operators to block domain names and IP addresses within 30 minutes of receiving a copyright notification. Cloudflare said the fine should have been capped at 140,000 euros ($161,000), or 2 percent of its Italian earnings, but that "AGCOM calculated the fine based on our global revenue, resulting in a penalty nearly 100 times higher than the legal limit."

Despite its complaints about the size of the fine, Cloudflare said the principles at stake "are even larger" than the financial penalty. "Piracy Shield is an unsupervised electronic portal through which an unidentified set of Italian media companies can submit websites and IP addresses that online service providers registered with Piracy Shield are then required to block within 30 minutes," Cloudflare said. Cloudflare is pushing for the law to be struck down, arguing that it is "incompatible with EU law, most notably the Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires that any content restriction be proportionate and subject to strict procedural safeguards."

In addition to appealing the fine, Cloudflare says it will continue to challenge Piracy Shield in Italian courts, engage with EU officials, and seek full access to AGCOM's Piracy Shield records.

Rock on CloudFlare

[Sean Clifford]

Rock on CloudFlare!

Re:

[Presence Eternal]

You should think twice before saying this rocks.

It is dangerous to be a geologist in Italy.

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[gweihir]

It is dangerous to be a geologist in Italy.

There are likely no competent and trustworthy geologists left in Italy.

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[sabbede]

To what are you referring? Does the Mafia hate geology or something?

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[Presence Eternal]

I was referring to a series of trials involving some earthquake scientists being found guilty of manslaughter for minimizing the risk of an earthquake.

https://www.science.org/conten... [science.org]

Re:

[sabbede]

Hmm, interesting. But nowhere near enough for me to form an opinion, but interesting. Thanks for the info!

The really fun bit was the ambiguity in what you said - "minimizing the risk of an earthquake" could also mean, "took steps to reduce the possibility of an earthquake or mitigate potential damage". And it would be pretty funny if someone was charged with manslaughter for that. How would it even work? Arguing that it would take away the livelihoods of construction workers who would do the rebuildin

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[Bu11etmagnet]

> It is dangerous to be a geologist in Italy.

It's dangerous to go alone. Take this.

DNS "blocking" is still a thing?

[gweihir]

How utterly incompetent and disconnected do you have to be to still think that DNS "blocking" works?

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[bloodhawk]

Not defending it as it is braindead, but for the majority of users whose technical knowledge consists of being able to install utorrent and browse the web with a browser to find it, it does actually work.

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[misnohmer]

Almost anyone able to install a torrent is able to google (or chatgpt) and use a workaround. Then those who really can't search will be taught by the ones which did it successfully.

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[noshellswill]

What does RESOLVE mean ?

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[mjwx]

How utterly incompetent and disconnected do you have to be to still think that DNS "blocking" works?

We're talking about politicians here, they don't want to understand what they're doing, they just want to make it look like they're doing something.

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[gweihir]

True.

Good luck...

[jonwil]

Cloudflare may be big but there is no way they will be able to overcome the power and influence of the Italian soccer league and the powerful entities that paid the big bucks for the rights to air the games.

just wait for an 911 like service to get shutdown

[Joe_Dragon]

Cloudflare may be big but there is no way they will be able to overcome the power and influence of the Italian soccer league and the powerful entities that paid the big bucks for the rights to air the games.

just wait for an 911 like service to get shutdown when they force ISP to block all of cloudflare on game day?

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[Ryanrule]

soccer teams can go to hell. bunch of rich children

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[havana9]

Italian football league and the TV networks have a lot of problems, because people are slowly going away from football. they're blame piracy for tne low number of subscription, but high prices, low quality of the shows and even lower quality of customer service have alienated people, and anyway kids and teen are more interested on other things rather than football.

Fining US companies only goes so far

[MIPSPro]

You can fine US tech companies, but only so much before they move out of your borders (once you try to fine them more than the profits they make in your country). That or the DOJ will step in [reuters.com] and tit-for-tat some of your own domestic companies. Most countries besides China couldn't go toe-to-toe with the US if they had to take as much abuse as they dished out.

Now the real way you can "protect" and "keep safe" your population is to build a Great Firewall like China has. Forcing all the locals to poison the

You completely misunderstand the situation

[Synonymous Homonym]

Italy's Piracy Shield exists only because of the USA.
It is Hollywood that demanded that all the world respects the DMCA, and it was the WTO and the USA trade representative who blackmailed anyone they could into implementing the required measures on penalty of trade tariffs.

That is why the EU has decided to allow internet censorship. (Yes, they did say "think of the children!")

And Cloudflare have broken Italian law. That is what they are being fined for.

The EU does not fine companies to make money. That'

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[MIPSPro]

The EU does not fine companies to make money. That's not how governance works.

I never said they did. However, they do issue fines (for whatever reason, it doesn't matter) ostensibly as an enforcement mechanism.

The USA have tried to DNS poison European companies before. Last I heard was about streaming football matches in Spain, and it was the DoHS who did it, or maybe ICE.

If you believe that you're very gullible and have bad news sources. Gonna need a link with some really good evidence to believe a single scrap of these obvious lies.

Ever since then, European ISPs have been careful about pulling DNS changes from the root servers, all of which have come under control of the USA during the previous decade.

More lies. Give me ANY fucking evidence that anyone has "been careful" about "pulling" DNS changes from root servers. First off, you don't seem to understand how root servers even work. They delegat

Run live demo in the court room

[Delicate Cybertron]

I'd like Cloudflare to run a demo on a stock laptop, in the court room where they ask any off-the-shelf AI agent to set up a caching DNS resolver and start using that to bypass any restriction. Try to make the law makers see how futile DNS blocking really is. Also, who else is on the receiving end? Google's 8.8.8.8? Quad9's 9.9.9.9?

All that is needed ...

[Big Bipper]

All that is needed is for some public minded individual with a bit of tech savvy, to hack into the " Piracy Shield, an unsupervised electronic portal" that the "unidentified set of Italian media companies can submit websites and IP addresses". Then they can publish their method, and then submit all the websites of the Italian government and their agencies. We'll soon see how the government likes what is sure to happen to innocent Italian companies.