[alanfranz]

Italian here.

If somebody wants to read the full document about the fine (in italian) it's here: https://www.agcom.it/sites/default/files/provvedimenti/delib...

Part of this doc states:

``` The rights holders also declared, under their own responsibility, providing certified documentary evidence of the current nature of the unlawful conduct, that the reported domain names and IP addresses were unequivocally intended to infringe the copyright and related rights of the audiovisual works relating to live broadcast sporting events and similar events covered by the reports. ```

So, I'm not sure anybody verified that what the right holders claimed was actually true. While I understand what AGCOM (the italian FCC, more-or-less) is trying to do, it seems that, as usual, a law was created without verifying how the implementation of such law would work in practice (something very common in Italy), and this is the result.

Cloudflare CEO seems irate, and some of his references are not great, but I'd be inclined at thinking he's got at least _some_ reason on his side.

[enricotal]

Also another Italian here. For context, the "Piracy Shield" mentioned in the order is basically a legislative hacksaw authorized by the regulator (AGCOM) primarily to protect Serie A football rights. Soccer rules Italy more than the Vatican..

It’s a mess technically: it mandates ISPs and DNS providers to block IPs/domains within 30 minutes of a report, with zero judicial oversight. It’s infamous locally for false positives—it has previously taken down Google Drive nodes and random legitimate CDNs just because they shared an IP with a pirate stream.

The NUCLEAR threat regarding the 2026 Winter Olympics (Milano-Cortina) is the real leverage here. He’s bypassing the regulator and putting a gun to the government’s head regarding national prestige and infrastructure security.

My personal take idea likely outcome: Cloudflare wins.

EU Law: The order almost certainly violates the Digital Services Act (DSA) regarding general monitoring obligations and country-of-origin principles. Realpolitik: The Italian government can't risk the Olympics infrastructure getting DDoS'd into oblivion because AGCOM picked a fight they can't win. They will likely settle for a standard, court-ordered geo-block down the road, but the idea of Cloudflare integrating with a broken 30-minute takedown API is dead on arrival.

[ta9000]

> The NUCLEAR threat regarding the 2026 Winter Olympics (Milano-Cortina) is the real leverage here. He’s bypassing the regulator and putting a gun to the government’s head regarding national prestige and infrastructure security.

Kind of wild that a private company has that kind of power, both in terms of being one of the few that can offer this service and they can make threats at this level.

[atmosx]

> but the idea of Cloudflare integrating with a broken 30-minute takedown API is dead on arrival.

Why? Technically it’s very easy. Wha if JDV asked CloudFlare to implement this on a different occasion? Would it be dead on arrival?

[Nextgrid]

A system like this could actually work as long as every takedown request involves posting a significant bond into a holding account and where the publisher can challenge the block and claim the bond if the block is ruled illegal.

This achieves the advantages of quick blocking while deterring bad behavior, and provides cost-effective recourse for publishers that get blocked, since the bond would cover the legal fees of challenging the block (lawyers can take those cases on contingency and get paid on recovery of the bond).

[torginus]

I don't get how censorship of this kind is even technically feasible?

I can rent a vpn on AWS, then connect to a stream hosted in Kazakhstan. You can't take down a website there, and you certainly can't rangeban AWS ips.

[xinayder]

Italy can also buy the bluff and you know, partner with an EU company to provide them the service Cloudflare would offer "for free".

[immibis]

Can someone report a bunch of government websites and legal streaming services and see what happens?

[easyThrowaway]

I just want to point out that AGCOM once decided to put out an "Economically Relevant Instagram Influencers Register".

They're not really... let's say, 'on the ball' for understanding how the internet works. It's a bit of a running joke in Italy that their decisions are often anachronistic or completely misunderstanding of the actual technology behind the scenes.

And for the most part they just deliberate, they have no direct judicial authority. They ask an administrative judge to operate on their decisions, which brings us to some of the favourite sentences for any italian lawyer: the... "Ricorso al TAR". ("appeal to the Regional Administrative Court", which is a polite way to say "You messed up, badly and repeatedly, and now we have to spend an eternity trying to sort this out in a court room").

[spicyjpeg]

If we truly want to point out the ridiculousness of Italian tech regulations, the influencers' registry, the temporary ChatGPT ban from a few years back or even the new AI regulations cannot hold a candle to the 22-year-old war on... arcade games.

A poorly written regulation from 2003 basically lumped together all gaming machines in a public setting with gambling, resulting in extremely onerous source code and server auditing requirements for any arcade cabinet connected to the internet (the law even goes as far as to specify that the code shall be delivered on CD-ROMs and compile on specific outdated Windows versions) as well as other certification burdens for new offline games and conversions of existing machines. Every Italian arcade has remained more or less frozen in time ever since, with the occasional addition of games modded to state on the title screen that they are a completely different cabinet (such as the infamous "Dance Dance Revolution NAOMI Universal") in an attempt to get around the certification requirements.

[torginus]

We live and have lived in a technological civilization for more than a hundred years. Legislators have NO EXCUSE to hide behind 'we don't understand the technology'. Sure computers are complex. But so are nuclear reactors, combustion engines and food safety.

If nuclear reactors cost 3x what they should, yet safety incidents occur 2x as often as they could because of stupid legislation, they shouldn't be able to hide behind 'we only have a legal diploma so we can't figure out what actuall works'.

For some reason, a lot of older folks consider computing as a 'low stakes game', as computers being either an annoyance or convenience but nothing more.

I don't know if the system is fundamentally flawed, and the people in charge are becoming less and less able to actually handle the reins of society and some major upheaval is necessary, or the system can be fixed as is, but this seems endemic and something should be done.

[UomoNeroNero]

This! Cazzo

[tjwebbnorfolk]

> a law was created without verifying how the implementation of such law would work in practice (something very common in Italy)

To be fair to Italy, this happens everywhere quite frequently. In my country (the US) we do this all too often.

[falaki]

Except that in the common law system of the United States, a judge can throw out the regulation.

[bobmcnamara]

> So, I'm not sure anybody verified that what the right holders claimed was actually true.

Yup, this will be weaponized by the MPAA/RIAA

[tomp]

Wait, so is this about censorship, or about copyright?

If the latter, I don't see why CloudFlare is complaining about "global" censorship. The US would simply seize the domains (which they have done so many times before), but I guess Italy doesn't have that power...

[subsistence234]

There's no accountability or due process. According to this brilliant law, if some crony with write-privilege adds your website to a list, the whole world has to ban your website within 30 minutes no questions asked.

[yibg]

Sometimes it's hard to differentiate between the 2. In this case it sounds like copyright in name but the implementation is such that it's a big hammer that can also be used for censorship if followed.

[wmf]

It's about copyright. Seizing domain names (registered outside Italy of course) can't be done in 30 minutes which is what the football overlords want.

[heraldgeezer]

>as usual, a law was created without verifying how the implementation of such law would work in practice (something very common in Italy), and this is the result.

This is everywhere.

The reason is you DONT want a law to be too detailed with tech mumbo jombo. If too detailed, it will get outdated. See that USA crypto wars ban in the 90s.

[miki123211]

I recently learned that Poland literally has a law on the books[1] (from the executive, not the legislative), mandating our use of SOAP and WSDL. You're definitely right on that score. As far as I know, it's supported by some EU directive or other, no less.

[1] (Polish) https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=WDU20240...

[rtpg]

So is this similar to the DCMA in the US, where there's a lot of iffyness about abuse and actually knowing that someone is actually a rights holder?

[SkiFire13]

At least with DMCA you so get a notice and you can somewhat challenge it. With Italy's Piracy Shield you have no notice and there's no public record of which IPs/websited have been blocked, so it's hard to even challenge it in court.

[mlrtime]

Not really, this is at a World level. Italy wants to ban an IP globally in 30 minutes.

DMCA take downs are domain specific with one provider. So scale is completely different here.

[kelvinjps10]

Is this similar to what happened in Spain?

[ShowalkKama]

yes, it's quite similar. They blocked some lawful services too such as google drive (yes, really) and a TON of sites behind cloudflare by blocking some of its IPs (it happened a while ago, it's not directly related to this).

[qsort]

Also Italian. I think everybody sucks here?

Most Italian authorities like this one are chock full of incompetents, and I'm almost sure they're just caving in to some soccer broadcaster or some crap like that. He might very well be fully correct on the fact of the matter.

Still, the rhetoric of the post is frankly disgusting. No, I'm not taking lessons in democracy from JD Vance, thank you very much. No, I don't think that might makes right and it's unsurprising that those who believe otherwise are so eager to transparently suck up to this administration.

Making public threats in this way is just vice signaling, nice bait.

[NamlchakKhandro]

But might does make rights.

Because all it takes is men with guns to change what rights you think you have.

If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights.

[j-krieger]

> No, I'm not taking lessons in democracy from JD Vance, thank you very much

You are falling into a trap where you can not recognize a true point because it is made by someone you disagree with. I don't condone Vance or the Trump admin. He is right about European governemnt's attacks on free speech.

[xinayder]

The AI generated art is also disgusting. Makes the CEO look like an angry kid because his multi-billion dolar industry got a 1% income fine, which is nothing for them, for a service they provide that keeps having outages because they have bad coders who thought moving their shit code to Rust was a good idea.

[riedel]

I would like to see a similar rant about the DMCA from US CEOs, which amounts to similar global effect. Not a great law but all this censorship stuff is bullshit.

To replicate the rant: Cloudflare on the otherhand blocks me regularly from using the Internet using a privacy aware browser because I fail to pass their bot checks so that I can enter their CDN based replica of a real internet.

[resfirestar]

To be fair big tech did do a full court press to stop site blocking when such a law (SOPA/PIPA) was proposed in the US, and they continue to oppose the MPA's attempts to get site blocking via the courts. DMCA on the other hand seems very broken, don't give the MPA the "3 strikes" regime they want and you get sued into the ground like Cox. I suspect tech CEOs don't complain about this because they don't want the same treatment.

[miki123211]

AFAIK, the DMCA doesn't require infrastructure providers (ISPs, DNS resolvers, "relay" services like Cloudflare) to block entire websites. It's just for surgical removals of content (and blocking of ISP / hosting provider customers who are notorious infringers).

The US doesn't have the kind of website blocking laws that many European countries have.

[Karuhanga]

I agree with this sentiment. His tweet was quite disingenuous and it doesn’t help that he’s tagging Musk and Vance. The noise they make about free speech is a charade.

I still can’t understand why these tech CEOs are doing so many cynical things even in places where they have the chance to start healthy debate.

It’s so frustrating.

[rcastellotti]

se non del tutto giusto, quasi niente sbagliato :)

[mcintyre1994]

He says that JD Vance and Elon Musk believe in free speech, so I’m inclined to conclude that he’s far beyond reason.

[mlrtime]

And I think that when you are so far biased in one direction there is nothing these two could do to alter your opinion in anyway. Thus making it irrelevant to the discussion.

[anthem2025]

Why would you be inclined to think that?

Why? Because tech companies have shown to bbe honest and transparent? Because their flouting of the law has ever been anything but extreme self interest?

FFS Grok is openly a revenge porn and CSAM generator. These aren’t good people and they aren’t the sort we want as champions of speech because they are not interested in anything but their own profits.

[bflesch]

I also wonder why he felt emboldened to escalate like this. Maybe he thinks Italy is so small it can be slapped around by a rage post on Twitter?

There's a DNS blocklist from media industry applied by German ISPs and I assume Cloudflare was also asked to block these websites, so why didn't I read a story about Cloudflare making a big stir about the German DNS blocking?

[j-krieger]

> There's a DNS blocklist from media industry applied by German ISPs

By the CUII with no judicial oversight. German organizations like the CCC and free speech activists very much hate that this is a thing.

[cubefox]

If the German filters only apply to ISPs in Germany, they have no effect on users in foreign countries. Moreover, Cloudflare is obviously not an ISP.

[carlosjobim]

What is the escalation? Cloudflare or any company is free to stop doing business in any country which mistreats them or doesn't align with their interest. How can you interpret this in some way as Cloudflare being the aggressor? They don't owe the nation of Italy anything.