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The Censors Strike Back: Italy’s Crusade Against the Open Internet
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Italy’s communications regulator, AGCOM, has fined Cloudflare €14.2 million after the company declined to apply government-ordered blocks on its public DNS resolver.
The case has become one of the clearest examples in Europe of how national censorship mandates can collide with global internet infrastructure.
Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 service, widely used for privacy and fast DNS resolution, was ordered to participate in Italy’s anti-piracy system known as Piracy Shield.
The program, launched in 2024, was designed to cut off access to live sports streams and other copyrighted material in near real time. The program has been a disaster.
The company refused. Cloudflare argued, rightly, that filtering its DNS traffic would be “impossible” without causing harm to the entire service.
AGCOM rejected that defense, claiming the company is not a purely “neutral intermediary” and is capable of implementing technical restrictions when it chooses to.
Piracy Shield gives AGCOM authority to order the blocking of domain names and IP addresses within 30 minutes of a request from rights holders.
Officials present the system as an innovative solution for piracy, but its automated structure has repeatedly led to overblocking.
Legitimate websites have been mistakenly blacklisted, and many of those incidents involved services connected through Cloudflare’s network.
Cloudflare has long questioned the legality and accuracy of Piracy Shield, warning that its opaque design lacks meaningful review or transparency.
Despite those objections, the company was formally instructed to comply with Order 49/25/CONS, issued in February 2025.
The directive extended blocking obligations to DNS and VPN providers, requiring them to deny resolution of domains identified as infringing.
Cloudflare declined to enforce the order, acknowledging that interference with its DNS resolver would disrupt billions of queries each day and degrade performance for lawful users.
The company warned that such filtering would have an “extremely negative impact on latency,” reducing service quality worldwide.
AGCOM dismissed these concerns and described the company’s defense as a “too big to block” argument. The regulator concluded that Cloudflare had violated its legal obligations and imposed a penalty of €14,247,698, equal to one percent of the company’s global revenue. Italian law allows for fines up to twice that amount.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince framed AGCOM’s action as something far broader than a copyright dispute. “Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined @Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet,” he wrote, situating the fine within what he described as a systemic attempt to normalize state-directed content control.
His description places the regulator’s action within a governance structure that operates outside traditional judicial safeguards, raising questions about accountability and limits on regulatory power.
Prince focused particular attention on the operational demands imposed by the Italian system. He stated that the scheme “required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any sites a shadowy cabal of European media elites deemed against their interests.”
He emphasized the absence of institutional safeguards, writing, “No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency.” This framing highlights a process where enforcement decisions are made rapidly and without meaningful checks, a structure that increases the risk of error and misuse.
The technical implications were central to his warning. Prince wrote that compliance would have required Cloudflare “to not just remove customers, but also censor our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver meaning it risked blacking out any site on the Internet.”
In its announcement, AGCOM described the decision as both novel and proportionate. “The measure, in addition to being one of the first financial penalties imposed in the copyright sector, is particularly significant given the role played by Cloudflare,” the regulator said. It claimed that about 70 percent of the targeted pirate sites rely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure and that the company’s participation is “essential” to the success of national enforcement efforts.
AGCOM’s conduct reflects a regulatory mindset that prioritizes control over technical reality.
By compelling a global DNS operator to implement local censorship orders, the agency demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how internet infrastructure functions.
DNS services like Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 do not operate on national boundaries, and forcing them to filter queries risks creating fragmented, inconsistent access across networks.
This approach undermines reliability and transparency, while exposing ordinary users to arbitrary disruptions.
Instead of addressing piracy through measured, rights-based enforcement, AGCOM has opted for blunt coercion that endangers both the neutrality of the network and the principle of free access to information.
Cloudflare is expected to appeal the fine.
The company has repeatedly stated that Piracy Shield lacks proper oversight and violates principles of due process.
Similar global providers, such as Google and OpenDNS, are watching closely, as the outcome could determine whether countries can compel DNS operators to enforce national blocking laws.
AGCOM says it intends to keep expanding the program. Since February 2024, the regulator reports that 65,000 domain names and 14,000 IP addresses have been blocked under Piracy Shield.
This case as a warning. If a national authority can force a global DNS provider to censor lookups inside its borders, the precedent may encourage others to extend similar powers. The underlying risk is that tools built to target piracy could evolve into mechanisms that limit access to lawful information, gradually eroding the neutrality of core internet infrastructure.
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