Italy fined Cloudflare 14.2 million euros for refusing to block access to pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, the country’s communications regulatory agency, AGCOM, announced yesterday. Cloudflare said it will fight the penalty and threatened to remove all of its servers from Italian cities.
AGCOM issued the fine under Italy’s controversial Piracy Shield law, saying that Cloudflare was required to disable DNS resolution of domain names and routing of traffic to IP addresses reported by copyright holders. The law provides for fines up to 2 percent of a company’s annual turnover, and the agency said it applied a fine equal to 1 percent.
The fine relates to a blocking order issued to Cloudflare in February 2025. Cloudflare argued that installing a filter applying to the roughly 200 billion daily requests to its DNS system would significantly increase latency and negatively affect DNS resolution for sites that aren’t subject to the dispute over piracy.
AGCOM rejected Cloudflare’s arguments. The agency said the required blocking would impose no risk on legitimate websites because the targeted IP addresses were all uniquely intended for copyright infringement.
In a September 2025 report on Piracy Shield, researchers said they found “hundreds of legitimate websites unknowingly affected by blocking, unknown operators experiencing service disruption, and illegal streamers continuing to evade enforcement by exploiting the abundance of address space online, leaving behind unusable and polluted address ranges.” This is “a conservative lower-bound estimate,” the report said.
The Piracy Shield law was adopted in 2024. “To effectively tackle live sports piracy, its broad blocking powers aim to block piracy-related domain names and IP addresses within 30 minutes,” TorrentFreak wrote in an article today about the Cloudflare fine.
Cloudflare to fight fine, may withhold services
Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince wrote today that Cloudflare already “had multiple legal challenges pending against the underlying scheme” and will “fight the unjust fine.”