alt Hacker NewsAlso 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.
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> but the idea of Cloudflare integrating with a broken 30-minute takedown API is dead on arrival.
Why? Technically it’s very easy. Wha if JDV asked CloudFlare to implement this on a different occasion? Would it be dead on arrival?
A system like this could actually work as long as every takedown request involves posting a significant bond into a holding account and where the publisher can challenge the block and claim the bond if the block is ruled illegal.
This achieves the advantages of quick blocking while deterring bad behavior, and provides cost-effective recourse for publishers that get blocked, since the bond would cover the legal fees of challenging the block (lawyers can take those cases on contingency and get paid on recovery of the bond).
I don't get how censorship of this kind is even technically feasible?
I can rent a vpn on AWS, then connect to a stream hosted in Kazakhstan. You can't take down a website there, and you certainly can't rangeban AWS ips.
Italy can also buy the bluff and you know, partner with an EU company to provide them the service Cloudflare would offer "for free".
Can someone report a bunch of government websites and legal streaming services and see what happens?
> 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.
Kind of wild that a private company has that kind of power, both in terms of being one of the few that can offer this service and they can make threats at this level.