Technology & Science
Italy Slaps €14M Fine on Cloudflare, Triggering DNS Censorship Standoff
On 8-9 Jan 2026 Italy’s AGCOM fined Cloudflare €14.2 million—1 % of its 2025 global turnover—for refusing since Feb 2025 to add country-specific pirate-site blocks to its global 1.1.1.1 DNS; Cloudflare will appeal and is threatening to pull its servers and Olympic cybersecurity from Italy.
Focusing Facts
- Order 333/25/CONS levied a €14,247,698 penalty on 8 Jan 2026, citing non-compliance with Order 49/25/CONS issued 18 Feb 2025.
- Piracy Shield requires DNS/IP blocking within 30 minutes of rightsholder notice; Cloudflare handles ~200 billion DNS queries daily and argues filtering would slow service worldwide.
- AGCOM says Piracy Shield has disabled 65,000 FQDNs and 14,000 IPs since its Feb 2024 launch.
Context
States trying to extend domestic control over border-agnostic networks echoes France’s 2009 HADOPI three-strike regime and the U.S. 2011 SOPA draft—both met stiff push-back and, in SOPA’s case, mass blackouts that killed the bill. Technically, Italy is testing whether an infrastructure layer (public DNS) can be conscripted as a copyright policeman; a trend also visible in India’s 2022 ‘dynamic’ blocking orders and Russia’s 2019 sovereign-Internet law. Over the last decade the Internet has drifted from a single, end-to-end network toward a patchwork of national intranets; this fine pushes that fragmentation further by daring a major backbone service to balkanize traffic or exit a G-7 market. On a 100-year horizon the episode matters less for the €14 million than for the precedent: if global intermediaries capitulate, the web could resemble 19th-century colonial telegraph lines—each segment governed by local gatekeepers; if they resist and win, it preserves the post-1969 principle that routing, like speech, transcends borders.
Perspectives
Italian mainstream and industry media
Italian mainstream and industry media — Present the €14 million penalty as a straightforward application of Italy’s Anti-Piracy Law 93/2023, showing AgCom’s resolve to force foreign service providers like Cloudflare to shut down access to pirated content. Stories largely quote the regulator and highlight enforcement successes while glossing over Cloudflare’s due-process criticisms, reflecting a pro-enforcement slant aligned with domestic right-holder interests.
Tech-oriented and free-speech focused outlets
Tech-oriented and free-speech focused outlets — Cast Cloudflare as a defender of an open Internet, arguing the Piracy Shield demands amount to global censorship with "no judicial oversight" and vowing that the company will fight the "unjust" fine. Coverage amplifies Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s rhetoric and U.S. political support, downplaying the financial harm piracy causes Italian sports leagues and treating the firm’s threats as principled rather than self-interested.
Digital-rights and piracy news reporters
Digital-rights and piracy news reporters — Describe the fine within a broader debate over Piracy Shield’s 30-minute blocking regime, emphasizing past overblocking of legitimate sites and Cloudflare’s claim that DNS filtering is disproportionate and technically harmful. By foregrounding collateral-damage anecdotes and technical objections, these reports risk normalizing continued access to infringing streams and may understate regulators’ evidence that the targeted IPs were "uniquely intended for copyright infringement."