Italy fines Cloudflare €14M for non compliance with anti piracy order
Italy’s communications regulator AGCOM has fined Cloudflare €14 million for failing to block access to piracy related domains under Italy’s anti piracy framework. The sanction, adopted on 29 December 2025, focuses on Cloudflare’s non compliance with the Piracy Shield system, which is meant to block access to pirated live sports and other copyrighted material. AGCOM said that despite prior notice, Cloudflare did not put in place adequate technical or organizational measures to prevent access to sites hosting illegal content.
Under Italian law, DNS providers must disable routing to IP addresses officially reported for piracy. AGCOM ordered Cloudflare to block DNS resolution for a list of domains through its public 1.1.1.1 resolver, but the company reportedly refused. The regulator also clarified that similar obligations can apply to other intermediaries such as search engines, VPN providers, and public DNS services, regardless of where they are based.
Cloudflare said mandatory DNS level filtering would be unreasonable and could disrupt service for billions of legitimate users worldwide. AGCOM rejected that argument, saying Cloudflare has the technical capacity to comply and that targeted blocking would not harm the 1.1.1.1 resolver. The regulator also noted that the €14 million fine is about 1% of the company’s global turnover, below the 2% maximum allowed under Italian law, and claimed that roughly 70% of the targeted piracy sites are linked to Cloudflare, with its services helping pirate operators bypass conventional blocking. Cloudflare can appeal the decision before the TAR Lazio administrative court.
- CDN
- Freemium
- Proprietary
Related news
External links
- Sanzione di oltre 14 milioni di euro a Cloudflare per violazione delle norme antipirateriaAgcom • Official source
- Cloudflare defies Italy’s Piracy Shield, won’t block websites on 1.1.1.1 DNSArs Technica
- Italy Fines Cloudflare €14 Million for Refusing to Filter Pirate Sites on Public 1.1.1.1 DNSTorrentFreak
- Italy hits Cloudflare with €14 million fine over Piracy Shield non-complianceNeowin
Comments
Cloudflare should simply respond by blocking access from Italy, I expect their tune would change really quickly.
In what kind of fantasy world to you live in? Companies should follow the law, its not the law that should follow companies.
Tell me exactly why cloudflare should be required to obey some half-baked antipiracy law in Italy, when they are an American company? Any company can choose not to provide service to any region for any reason they choose. What kind of fantasy world do you live in where companies are forced to operate in a country they don't want to comply with?
Why are people suddenly blindly defending these draconian internet censorship and control laws?
In Germany for example, if you use torrent to downlaod anything even legal stuff you get fined thousands of euros. Torrent is a protocol and as such can be used for downloading legal stuff faster, however Germany deemed it illegal and as such it can't be used without a VPN.
Italy is sadly going that direction....
Source: My experience and my friend's costly mistake
What, really?! I mean legally you are allowed if it doesn't involve copyrighted/unlicensed content. But yeah, many of these tracking companies might also send threat letters to innocent users, too. It's all Neuland, as we like to call it, and many people are incompetent af but are also the loudest.
This is ridiculous. With governments like these, there is simply no way not to implement censorship. I hope Cloudflare does some malicious compliance and blocks more than just the piracy websites. Maybe some well crafted downtime would knock some sense into these regulators.
Cloudflare could block pro-Meloni sites as it is now apparently their responsibility to protect their users from "malicious" sites. That would've been so funny.