Serie A gets a boost in the fight against digital piracy, but Cloudfare threatens Italy’s withdrawal

January 12 – Italy’s long fight against sports piracy escalates after the country fines Cloudflare €14.2 million for refusing to block access to pirate streaming sites via its DNS 1.1.1.1 service. The punishment, issued by communications regulator AGCOM under the Piracy Shield law, provides significant support to Serie A and its clubs, whose broadcasting rights are at the heart of the law.

Piracy Shield was introduced in 2024 to enable rapid blocking of illegal streaming, particularly live Serie A matches, to protect domestic broadcasters such as DAZN and Sky. Rights holders argue that real-time piracy is draining the value of Italian football, weakening revenues and weakening the league’s ability to compete financially with Europe’s elite.

AGCOM said Cloudflare was required to disable DNS resolution and redirect traffic from IP addresses flagged by copyright holders, and imposed a fine of 1% of the company’s annual turnover. Cloudflare argues that filtering some 200 billion DNS requests every day would increase latency and risk disrupting legitimate websites. Unsurprisingly, regulators rejected the claims and insisted that the targeted IP addresses were intended solely for copyright infringement.

Critics say the case reveals deeper weaknesses in Piracy Shield. A research report in September 2025 found “hundreds of legitimate sites unknowingly impacted by blocking,” service disruptions for unrelated operators, and illegal streamers continuing to evade law enforcement by changing addresses. The researchers described their findings as a “conservative lower bound estimate.”

Cloudflare said it would fight the fine and warned of wider consequences. Co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince called Piracy Shield “a scheme to censor the Internet,” arguing that it operates without legal oversight. There is no legal process. No appeal. No transparency. He added that Italy demanded global censorship, not just domestic blocking.

Prince said Cloudflare is considering withdrawing free cybersecurity services for Italy, including planned support for the 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics, removing servers from Italian cities, and halting future investments. “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” he wrote.

There’s no doubt that the league’s piracy problem is real, but the Cloudflare standoff shows how aggressive enforcement risks creating new problems for Italian football and the country’s digital reputation.

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