10 ms·

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/deliber

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/delibera/2026/Delibera%20333_25_CONS_Cloudflare_Ordinanza%20Ingiunzione_CLEAN_per%20pubblicazione.pdf 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.

bflesch 9mo ago
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?
- cubefox 9mo ago
  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.
  - bflesch 9mo ago
    Do you think the Italian bureaucrats really want to ban something in France or Germany? The Cloudflare CEO is clearly misinterpreting something that was lost in translation, which is the bureaucrats stating "Cloudflare must prevent access to XY from everywhere". For bureaucrats "everywhere" means "in my jurisdiction". I cannot believe that the Cloudflare CEO is trying to nitpick around a single word that he so clearly misinterprets.
    - cubefox 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - monsieurbanana 9mo ago
        Or he perfectly understands what they meant but chose to create artificial outrage. "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity" has not aged well in 2026
      - bflesch 9mo ago
        No, in fact I think most in US tech are awfully ignorant about Europe. That's why I explicitly brought it up. Just because we Europeans can speak your language doesn't mean that people from the US understand how our countries work. And most US tech companies are located in Ireland in a small US expat bubble.
        cubefox 9mo ago
        You are presumably also not an Italian, so I don't know why you would know more about Italy than he just because you are European. I'm also European, and I certainly don't thereby know more about Italy than about, say, the US.
    - tick_tock_tick 9mo ago
      > Do you think the Italian bureaucrats really want to ban something in France or Germany? Yes 100% they absolutely do.
  - riffraff 9mo ago
    the filters the Italian authorities complain about also only apply in italy. It's likely a process thing, Italy has had website bans since forever, but the new regulation applies _without going through a judge_. Some copyright holders can say "this website is infringing" and ISPs, CDNs etc.. are required to shut them down immediately. A similar system was introduced in Spain, with the same problems, for the same reason (football $$$). EDIT: to be clear, CF argues that they need to block the DNS globally, and that's unreasonable. The Italian authority argues that they have the skills to do a local block and are just being uncooperative.
    - blibble 9mo ago
      > The Italian authority argues that they have the skills to do a local block they certainly do, they have the source IP and their platform lets them geolocate an ip
    - Root_Denied 9mo ago
      > EDIT: to be clear, CF argues that they need to block the DNS globally, and that's unreasonable. The Italian authority argues that they have the skills to do a local block and are just being uncooperative. Similar to the UK's attempt to try and get noncompliant sites like Imgur and 4chan to block themselves from serving content to UK locations, I think the responsibility for country-wide blocks lies with the country attempting to regulate the space, not CDNs or websites. I don't doubt that Italy is correct that CF has the technical ability do a local block like they're asking for, but I also don't see how CF is in any way (legally) compelled to do so. Whether or not Italy (or any country) is capable of doing so, or paying contractors for an appropriate solution, isn't CF's problem either.
      - wmf 9mo ago
        The difference is that Imgur/4chan have no presence in the UK but Cloudflare has servers and probably a sales office in Italy. Cloudflare does have to follow Italian law within Italy. Either Cloudflare can block pirate sites or ISPs will completely block Cloudflare (as seen in Spain). Which way do you prefer?
  - nkmnz 9mo ago
    I'm pretty sure Cloudflare is an ISP according to German law ("Diensteanbieter" according to DDG). You might confuse "ISP" with the terminology of "Access Provider" according to the (now defunct) §8 TMG.
    - cubefox 9mo ago
      If that were true, sci-hub.se would be blocked in Germany on 1.1.1.1 (1dot1dot1dot1.cloudflare-dns.com), it isn't blocked, therefore it's not true. (Modus tollens)
      - nkmnz 9mo ago
        Your reasoning is impeccable, bravo. But it's wrong. Both your premise and your conclusion are based on completely wrong assumptions.
        cubefox 9mo ago
        Not sure which premise you disagree with, but the conclusion follows from them.
        nkmnz 9mo ago
        I am a Service Provider ("Diensteanbieter") according to DDG and I don't block a single page, which makes your statement not only wrong, but rather so wrong that not even the complete opposite would make any sense.
        cubefox 9mo ago
        Not necessarily. Perhaps small service providers are exempt from blocking sci-hub.se. But Cloudflare is certainly not small.
        nkmnz 9mo ago
        Have you ever considered reading the law before attempting to discuss it?
- carlosjobim 9mo ago
  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.
- selfmodruntime 9mo ago
  > 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.
  - bflesch 9mo ago
    Yes, I didn't want to say it is a good thing.
  - nkmnz 9mo ago
    Posting it a hundred times doesn't make your claim more correct. If your rights are infringed, you can always go to court. If you think you being blocked from accessing certain information is an infringement of Art. 2 Abs. 1 GG ("Every person shall have the right to free development of his personality [...]"), you can drag this to The Federal Constitutional Court.
    - selfmodruntime 9mo ago
      No I can't, since I lack the monetary funds. My claim stands correct, going to the federal constitutional court is expensive enough that many people are barred from that option. My claim stands correct - no judicial verdict is needed for the CUII to censor websites. Don't believe me. Believe the activists [1]. [1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-cuii-wie-konzerne-heimlich-webseiten-in-deutschland-sperren https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-cuii-wie-konzerne-heimlich-webse...
      - nkmnz 9mo ago
        new comment: you're so wrong that not even the opposite of your statement would be true. CUII is a private body, but it forces its members to go to court before they ask CUII to initiate a block: Jede DNS-Sperre einer strukturell urheberrechtsverletzenden Webseite (SUW) wird im Rahmen der CUII gerichtlich überprüft. Das ist freiwillige Selbstverpflichtung der CUII-Mitglieder. Denn eigentlich besteht kein Richtervorbehalt für die Sperransprüche nach § 8 Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz (DDG). Aus diesem Grund sind auch die DNS-Sperren nach dem alten Verhaltenskodex mit behördlicher Beteiligung zulässig gewesen (Siehe Fragen: “Was verändert sich durch den neuen Verhaltenskodex der CUII?” und “Warum gab es zum Juli 2025 - nach jahrelanger Arbeit - einen Systemwechsel in der CUII?”). old comment: CUII is not a governmental body so what the hell should they need a court order for when doing the thing that their members pay them to do? If your not happy with your internet access provider being a member of CUII, switch your internet access provider. I agree that CUII should publish a list of blocked domains as part of transparent communication and proving that they are doing a good job.
tjwebbnorfolk 9mo ago
> 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 9mo ago
  Except that in the common law system of the United States, a judge can throw out the regulation.
  - arlort 9mo ago
    That's very much not the difference between common and civil law If the law is constitutional it can't be thrown out by a judge in common law and if it's not it can be declared so in civil law The difference between the two is more about what happens in the absence of a law
bobmcnamara 9mo ago
> 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
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
qsort 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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.
  - dragonwriter 9mo ago
    Might can defend, or violate, rights, but it does not make them.
    - DangitBobby 9mo ago
      What does make them? Children apparently don't have them, and many races in many countries didn't have them for a long time either. How do you account for that? Are we now distinguishing between "having" rights and uh... being allow to use them?
  - burkaman 9mo ago
    This is the Stephen Miller caveman view of the world, but it obviously doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than five seconds. It's a very straightforward consequence of refusing to ever admit you are wrong. "If I did it, then I must have had the right to do it." It's just a refusal to accept the philosophical concept of rights. The right to vote doesn't exist because you didn't have to defeat the entire army to vote against their leader, it's just that the leader benevolently decided to let you vote against them. You don't have the right to life, it's just that everyone on the planet with a weapon has coincidentally decided not to murder you, for now. Laws don't actually exist. Any right that appeared to be established against the wishes of the men with guns (i.e. all of them) was actually fake or an inexplicable accident. You can imagine a world that works like this, but it certainly isn't our world. No historical period or even any fictional story I can think of operates like this.
tomp 9mo ago
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...
- wmf 9mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - t0mas88 9mo ago
    What is it with Southern Europe and the football overlords? Spain is blocking half the internet, Italy is fighting Cloudflare. What's up? Are football leagues big political donors?
    - Fire-Dragon-DoL 9mo ago
      No usually the political figures are football league owners. Jokes aside, I don't know, the obsession with soccer is extreme in Italy. For people who don't care about soccer like I did, there is so much you have to endure just "because of soccer"
      - matwood 9mo ago
        It's not just Italy. The UK is also insane along with some cities in Spain. In the UK one of the rivalries supposedly goes back to the War of the Roses [1]. The way I describe EU football games to Americans is take the craziest student section at a US college football game and extrapolate that energy to the entire stadium. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeds_United_F.C.–Manchester_United_F.C._rivalry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeds_United_F.C.–Manchester_U...
easyThrowaway 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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.
  - badsectoracula 9mo ago
    I guess they were inspired by a very similar law in Greece from 2002[0] where in an attempt to outlaw illegal gambling done in arcades a poorly written law outlawed all games (the article mentions it was in was in public places but IIRC the law was for both public and private and the government pinky promised that they'll only act on public places). I remember reading that some internet cafes were raided by the police too :-P. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_3037/2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_3037/2002
heraldgeezer 9mo ago
>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 9mo ago
  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=WDU20240000773 https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=WDU20240...
rcastellotti 9mo ago
se non del tutto giusto, quasi niente sbagliato :)
kelvinjps10 9mo ago
Is this similar to what happened in Spain?
- ShowalkKama 9mo ago
  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).
  - paganel 9mo ago
    It's in a way related because this is also meant to combat "football streaming piracy", the same as in Spain. Idiot moves.
riedel 9mo ago
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.
- _23sd 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
  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.
  - riedel 9mo ago
    If you look at those 'whole websites' it is nearly exclusively sites that do not comply with takedown requests regarding copyright (actually those blocking laws/procedures do mostly foresee any other reason). The question I was addressing is the judicial control and the abuse for censorship. DCMA takedown request are massively abused without any real judicial control. Sure you can fight those in court, but so you could fight ISP blocks. I thing the different methods simply stem from a different legal system with different types of fines (particularly in civil law)
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
anthem2025 9mo ago
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.
enricotal 9mo ago
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.
- immibis 9mo ago
  Can someone report a bunch of government websites and legal streaming services and see what happens?
  - kavaruka 9mo ago
    Only right owners can report websites, the Piracy Shield is essentially a tool in the hands of “Serie A Soccer League” and DAZN.
    - _aavaa_ 9mo ago
      How is the rights holder verified in 30 minutes?
      - wmf 9mo ago
        I'm sure they have a preexisting relationship with AGCOM.
rtpg 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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.
  - Nextgrid 9mo ago
    Nothing prevents anyone from sending in a fake notice anonymously, which will still force any provider to take down your content until challenged.
- mlrtime 9mo ago
  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.
torginus 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  This! Cazzo
mcintyre1994 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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.
Karuhanga 9mo ago
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.

bflesch 9mo ago

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?

cubefox 9mo ago
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.
- bflesch 9mo ago
  Do you think the Italian bureaucrats really want to ban something in France or Germany? The Cloudflare CEO is clearly misinterpreting something that was lost in translation, which is the bureaucrats stating "Cloudflare must prevent access to XY from everywhere". For bureaucrats "everywhere" means "in my jurisdiction". I cannot believe that the Cloudflare CEO is trying to nitpick around a single word that he so clearly misinterprets.
  - cubefox 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - monsieurbanana 9mo ago
      Or he perfectly understands what they meant but chose to create artificial outrage. "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity" has not aged well in 2026
    - bflesch 9mo ago
      No, in fact I think most in US tech are awfully ignorant about Europe. That's why I explicitly brought it up. Just because we Europeans can speak your language doesn't mean that people from the US understand how our countries work. And most US tech companies are located in Ireland in a small US expat bubble.
      - cubefox 9mo ago
        You are presumably also not an Italian, so I don't know why you would know more about Italy than he just because you are European. I'm also European, and I certainly don't thereby know more about Italy than about, say, the US.
  - tick_tock_tick 9mo ago
    > Do you think the Italian bureaucrats really want to ban something in France or Germany? Yes 100% they absolutely do.
- riffraff 9mo ago
  the filters the Italian authorities complain about also only apply in italy. It's likely a process thing, Italy has had website bans since forever, but the new regulation applies _without going through a judge_. Some copyright holders can say "this website is infringing" and ISPs, CDNs etc.. are required to shut them down immediately. A similar system was introduced in Spain, with the same problems, for the same reason (football $$$). EDIT: to be clear, CF argues that they need to block the DNS globally, and that's unreasonable. The Italian authority argues that they have the skills to do a local block and are just being uncooperative.
  - blibble 9mo ago
    > The Italian authority argues that they have the skills to do a local block they certainly do, they have the source IP and their platform lets them geolocate an ip
  - Root_Denied 9mo ago
    > EDIT: to be clear, CF argues that they need to block the DNS globally, and that's unreasonable. The Italian authority argues that they have the skills to do a local block and are just being uncooperative. Similar to the UK's attempt to try and get noncompliant sites like Imgur and 4chan to block themselves from serving content to UK locations, I think the responsibility for country-wide blocks lies with the country attempting to regulate the space, not CDNs or websites. I don't doubt that Italy is correct that CF has the technical ability do a local block like they're asking for, but I also don't see how CF is in any way (legally) compelled to do so. Whether or not Italy (or any country) is capable of doing so, or paying contractors for an appropriate solution, isn't CF's problem either.
    - wmf 9mo ago
      The difference is that Imgur/4chan have no presence in the UK but Cloudflare has servers and probably a sales office in Italy. Cloudflare does have to follow Italian law within Italy. Either Cloudflare can block pirate sites or ISPs will completely block Cloudflare (as seen in Spain). Which way do you prefer?
- nkmnz 9mo ago
  I'm pretty sure Cloudflare is an ISP according to German law ("Diensteanbieter" according to DDG). You might confuse "ISP" with the terminology of "Access Provider" according to the (now defunct) §8 TMG.
  - cubefox 9mo ago
    If that were true, sci-hub.se would be blocked in Germany on 1.1.1.1 (1dot1dot1dot1.cloudflare-dns.com), it isn't blocked, therefore it's not true. (Modus tollens)
    - nkmnz 9mo ago
      Your reasoning is impeccable, bravo. But it's wrong. Both your premise and your conclusion are based on completely wrong assumptions.
      - cubefox 9mo ago
        Not sure which premise you disagree with, but the conclusion follows from them.
        nkmnz 9mo ago
        I am a Service Provider ("Diensteanbieter") according to DDG and I don't block a single page, which makes your statement not only wrong, but rather so wrong that not even the complete opposite would make any sense.
        cubefox 9mo ago
        Not necessarily. Perhaps small service providers are exempt from blocking sci-hub.se. But Cloudflare is certainly not small.
        nkmnz 9mo ago
        Have you ever considered reading the law before attempting to discuss it?
carlosjobim 9mo ago
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.
selfmodruntime 9mo ago
> 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.
- bflesch 9mo ago
  Yes, I didn't want to say it is a good thing.
- nkmnz 9mo ago
  Posting it a hundred times doesn't make your claim more correct. If your rights are infringed, you can always go to court. If you think you being blocked from accessing certain information is an infringement of Art. 2 Abs. 1 GG ("Every person shall have the right to free development of his personality [...]"), you can drag this to The Federal Constitutional Court.
  - selfmodruntime 9mo ago
    No I can't, since I lack the monetary funds. My claim stands correct, going to the federal constitutional court is expensive enough that many people are barred from that option. My claim stands correct - no judicial verdict is needed for the CUII to censor websites. Don't believe me. Believe the activists [1]. [1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-cuii-wie-konzerne-heimlich-webseiten-in-deutschland-sperren https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-cuii-wie-konzerne-heimlich-webse...
    - nkmnz 9mo ago
      new comment: you're so wrong that not even the opposite of your statement would be true. CUII is a private body, but it forces its members to go to court before they ask CUII to initiate a block: Jede DNS-Sperre einer strukturell urheberrechtsverletzenden Webseite (SUW) wird im Rahmen der CUII gerichtlich überprüft. Das ist freiwillige Selbstverpflichtung der CUII-Mitglieder. Denn eigentlich besteht kein Richtervorbehalt für die Sperransprüche nach § 8 Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz (DDG). Aus diesem Grund sind auch die DNS-Sperren nach dem alten Verhaltenskodex mit behördlicher Beteiligung zulässig gewesen (Siehe Fragen: “Was verändert sich durch den neuen Verhaltenskodex der CUII?” und “Warum gab es zum Juli 2025 - nach jahrelanger Arbeit - einen Systemwechsel in der CUII?”). old comment: CUII is not a governmental body so what the hell should they need a court order for when doing the thing that their members pay them to do? If your not happy with your internet access provider being a member of CUII, switch your internet access provider. I agree that CUII should publish a list of blocked domains as part of transparent communication and proving that they are doing a good job.

tjwebbnorfolk 9mo ago

> 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 9mo ago
Except that in the common law system of the United States, a judge can throw out the regulation.
- arlort 9mo ago
  That's very much not the difference between common and civil law If the law is constitutional it can't be thrown out by a judge in common law and if it's not it can be declared so in civil law The difference between the two is more about what happens in the absence of a law

bobmcnamara 9mo ago

> 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

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

qsort 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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.
- dragonwriter 9mo ago
  Might can defend, or violate, rights, but it does not make them.
  - DangitBobby 9mo ago
    What does make them? Children apparently don't have them, and many races in many countries didn't have them for a long time either. How do you account for that? Are we now distinguishing between "having" rights and uh... being allow to use them?
- burkaman 9mo ago
  This is the Stephen Miller caveman view of the world, but it obviously doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than five seconds. It's a very straightforward consequence of refusing to ever admit you are wrong. "If I did it, then I must have had the right to do it." It's just a refusal to accept the philosophical concept of rights. The right to vote doesn't exist because you didn't have to defeat the entire army to vote against their leader, it's just that the leader benevolently decided to let you vote against them. You don't have the right to life, it's just that everyone on the planet with a weapon has coincidentally decided not to murder you, for now. Laws don't actually exist. Any right that appeared to be established against the wishes of the men with guns (i.e. all of them) was actually fake or an inexplicable accident. You can imagine a world that works like this, but it certainly isn't our world. No historical period or even any fictional story I can think of operates like this.

tomp 9mo ago

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...

wmf 9mo ago
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.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- t0mas88 9mo ago
  What is it with Southern Europe and the football overlords? Spain is blocking half the internet, Italy is fighting Cloudflare. What's up? Are football leagues big political donors?
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 9mo ago
    No usually the political figures are football league owners. Jokes aside, I don't know, the obsession with soccer is extreme in Italy. For people who don't care about soccer like I did, there is so much you have to endure just "because of soccer"
    - matwood 9mo ago
      It's not just Italy. The UK is also insane along with some cities in Spain. In the UK one of the rivalries supposedly goes back to the War of the Roses [1]. The way I describe EU football games to Americans is take the craziest student section at a US college football game and extrapolate that energy to the entire stadium. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeds_United_F.C.–Manchester_United_F.C._rivalry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeds_United_F.C.–Manchester_U...

easyThrowaway 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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.
- badsectoracula 9mo ago
  I guess they were inspired by a very similar law in Greece from 2002[0] where in an attempt to outlaw illegal gambling done in arcades a poorly written law outlawed all games (the article mentions it was in was in public places but IIRC the law was for both public and private and the government pinky promised that they'll only act on public places). I remember reading that some internet cafes were raided by the police too :-P. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_3037/2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_3037/2002

heraldgeezer 9mo ago

>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 9mo ago
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=WDU20240000773 https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=WDU20240...

rcastellotti 9mo ago

se non del tutto giusto, quasi niente sbagliato :)

kelvinjps10 9mo ago

Is this similar to what happened in Spain?

ShowalkKama 9mo ago
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).
- paganel 9mo ago
  It's in a way related because this is also meant to combat "football streaming piracy", the same as in Spain. Idiot moves.

riedel 9mo ago

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.

_23sd 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
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.
- riedel 9mo ago
  If you look at those 'whole websites' it is nearly exclusively sites that do not comply with takedown requests regarding copyright (actually those blocking laws/procedures do mostly foresee any other reason). The question I was addressing is the judicial control and the abuse for censorship. DCMA takedown request are massively abused without any real judicial control. Sure you can fight those in court, but so you could fight ISP blocks. I thing the different methods simply stem from a different legal system with different types of fines (particularly in civil law)

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

anthem2025 9mo ago

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.

enricotal 9mo ago

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.

immibis 9mo ago
Can someone report a bunch of government websites and legal streaming services and see what happens?
- kavaruka 9mo ago
  Only right owners can report websites, the Piracy Shield is essentially a tool in the hands of “Serie A Soccer League” and DAZN.
  - _aavaa_ 9mo ago
    How is the rights holder verified in 30 minutes?
    - wmf 9mo ago
      I'm sure they have a preexisting relationship with AGCOM.

rtpg 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  Nothing prevents anyone from sending in a fake notice anonymously, which will still force any provider to take down your content until challenged.
mlrtime 9mo ago
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.

torginus 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
This! Cazzo

mcintyre1994 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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.

Karuhanga 9mo ago

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.