Cloudflare appeals Italy's €14M fine as Piracy Shield "black box" sparks censorship fears
Cloudflare is persisting in its legal battle against Italy’s Piracy Shield, which is considered a “blunt tool” to fight copyright infringement, and AGCOM’s fine of €14 million for violating anti-piracy regulations.
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Cloudflare is persisting in its legal battle against Italy’s Piracy Shield, which is considered a “blunt tool” to fight copyright infringement, and AGCOM’s fine of €14 million for violating anti-piracy regulations.
- Cloudflare is appealing Italy's €14 million fine for refusing to comply with anti-piracy website blocking orders through its DNS resolver.
- Italy's Piracy Shield law requires companies to block reported sites within 30 minutes, but Cloudflare calls it a "black box" with no judicial oversight or appeal process.
- The system has already caused major outages for innocent websites due to overblocking, as IP addresses are shared by thousands of sites.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
In February 2025, the Italian communications regulator AGCOM ordered Cloudflare to block access to a series of websites that contained copyrighted content. However, the company refused to comply with the request to block these websites via its public 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver.
According to Cloudflare, the request was unreasonable and impractical, as it would require the company to build a filter that checks all DNS requests. Furthermore, this would lead to significant delays in internet traffic and potentially result in global censorship.
AGCOM considered Cloudflare’s refusal a violation of the country’s Piracy Shield regulation, which aims to block websites that offer copyright-protected material without permission. Companies that are reported must block the website within 30 minutes.
Therefore, the regulator issued a fine of €14 million to Cloudflare.
The American internet service provider isn’t going to simply accept this and is prepared to fight tooth and nail to put a stop to Italy’s Piracy Shield regulation.
Cloudflare considers Italy’s Piracy Shield a “black box” because there’s no judicial oversight, no transparency about who requested a block or why, no mechanism for a website owner to challenge a block, and no option to seek redress from erroneous blocking.
On top of that, the Piracy Shield creates a risk of overblocking innocent websites because IP addresses are regularly and necessarily shared by thousands of websites.
“Not surprisingly, within a few months of its launch, Piracy Shield caused major outages for people and businesses who had done nothing wrong,” Cloudflare states.
Cloudflare’s concerns are also expressed by the European Commission, which issued a letter on June 13th, 2025, criticizing the lack of oversight inherent in the Piracy Shield framework.
Lastly, the American tech company is appealing the €14 million fine, which is believed to be “disproportionate.”
“We will continue to pursue this challenge in the Italian courts and through the European Commission. Global connectivity is too important to be governed by ‘black boxes’ with 30-minute deadlines that result in widespread overblocking with no means of redress,” Cloudflare says.
“We remain committed to building a better internet: one where the rules are transparent, the regulators are accountable, and the infrastructure that connects the world remains free, open, and secure,” the company concludes.
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