The company that provides services for 20% of the global internet threatens Italy to cut its access: “This is an important fight and we will win it”

Cloudflare's CEO has threatened to withdraw the company's services in Italy after the Italian communications regulator fined it the equivalent of 1 percent of its annual revenue for violating anti-piracy regulations, The Register reports.

Cloudflare, a name little known to the general public until last November when a major outage of its services affected numerous platforms and websites around the world, has now come into conflict with Italy over the country's so-called “Anti-Piracy Shield”.

It is essentially an Italian law that is enforced by the telecommunications regulator, Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (AGCOM).

Copyright holders can submit a blocking request to AGCOM. If the authority approves the request, it uses an automated system to inform Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and other actors that they must block access to certain IP addresses and not provide DNS services for domains suspected of facilitating piracy.

The most vocal proponents of the “Anti-Piracy Shield” are the Italian soccer leagues Serie A and Serie B, which want to stop pirated broadcasts of the matches they organize in order to protect their revenue. Other Italian copyright holders also support this regulation.

On January 8, AGCOM announced that it had asked Cloudflare, whose services are used by 20% of the global internet, to block certain websites and that the Silicon Valley firm had not complied with its orders. As a result, the authority decided to fine Cloudflare with 1% of its annual revenues, just over 14 million euros. The amount is more than twice the company's revenue from Italy.

Cloudflare CEO accuses Italy of trying to censor the internet

In a vehement message published on the social network “X”, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince described AGCOM as “a quasi-judicial body” that administers “an internet censorship mechanism” on behalf of “a shadowy cabal of European media elites”.

“No judicial oversight. No due process. No right of appeal. No transparency,” Prince wrote. “We were asked not only to remove clients, but also to censor our DNS resolver 1.1.1.1, which risked leaving any site on the Internet without access. And we were asked not to censor content just in Italy, but globally. In other words, Italy insists that a shadowy European media cabal can dictate what is and isn't allowed online.”

Tech site The Register notes that Prince's claims are not entirely self-interested, as many have pointed out that shared infrastructure makes it possible for malicious actors and law-abiding operators to use the same IP address and DNS. An IP address can correspond to more than one fully qualified domain name, which means that an address like “piratefootball.bigcompany.com” can have the same IP address as “employeeportal.bigcompany.com”. Blocking a single IP address can therefore result in the effective disappearance of many other perfectly legitimate sites from the Internet.

Cloudflare has repeatedly pointed out that IP-level blocking can affect completely innocent individual users. Independent researchers came to similar conclusions and showed that Italy's “Anti-Piracy Shield” can be bypassed with the help of a VPN service.

In his message, Prince described the “Anti-Piracy Shield” as “contrary to democratic values” and promised to appeal the fine. He then said Cloudflare could respond to the fine by taking the following steps:

• termination of pro bono cyber security services, worth millions of dollars, for the upcoming Milan-Cortina Olympic Games;
• termination of Cloudflare's free cybersecurity services for all users in Italy;
• withdrawal of all servers in Italian cities;
• and canceling all plans to open a Cloudflare office in Italy or make investments in that country.

The Winter Olympics begin on February 6, so a possible Cloudflare withdrawal would be extremely inconvenient for the event's technical team – something Prince made explicit in his message, saying he would inform the International Olympic Committee of the “risk to the Olympics”.

Prince says he'll complain to Donald Trump

Cloudflare's CEO also said he would bring this incident to the attention of the Trump administration.

“While there are things I would handle differently than the current US administration, I appreciate that @JDVance [vicepreședintele JD Vance] takes a leading role in recognizing that this type of regulation is a fundamental problem of unfair competition in trade and also threatens democratic values. And in this case, @ElonMusk is right: #FreeSpeech is essential and under attack from a cabal of disconnected and deeply disturbed European decision-makers.”

Prince ended his message by saying that he agreed that Italy has the right to regulate within its own borders, but that it must do so by following legal procedures and imposing requirements that do not force Cloudflare and other companies to block content for users outside national borders.

“THIS IS AN IMPORTANT FIGHT AND WE WILL WIN IT!!!” he wrote in all caps to end his message.

Italy's response to Cloudflare threats

One of the responses to Prince's post came from Italian senator Claudio Borghi, who pointed out that AGCOM is an independent regulator so the fine is not a matter of government policy, but said his party “will do its best to check if there was any misunderstanding about Cloudflare's role.”

“I can assure you that this case will be thoroughly analyzed with full fairness,” wrote the senator, a member of Matteo Salvini's Lega party.

Prince responded that Cloudflare is “willing to engage in dialogue to resolve these issues.”

“We don't want piracy on our platform: it blocks our infrastructure and costs us money,” added the CEO. “We are working with copyright holders around the world to fight it. Unfortunately, the Italian authorities have been unwilling to engage in dialogue,” added Matthew Price.