Italy fines Cloudflare €14.2M for refusing to block pirate sites via 1.1.1.1

Italy’s communications regulator AGCOM has fined Cloudflare €14.2 million for refusing to block access to pirate websites through its public DNS service, 1.1.1.1.

Cloudflare said it will appeal the ruling and has not ruled out drastic measures, including withdrawing parts of its infrastructure from the country.

The fine was issued under Italy’s Piracy Shield law, which requires internet services to restrict access to copyright-infringing resources. AGCOM ordered Cloudflare to disable DNS resolution and traffic routing to IP addresses linked to pirate sites. The law allows fines of up to 2% of annual turnover, and the regulator applied a 1% penalty in this case.

The dispute stems from an order issued to Cloudflare in February 2025. At the time, the company argued that filtering roughly 200 billion DNS queries per day would increase latency and potentially disrupt legitimate websites. AGCOM rejected this argument, stating that the blocking applies only to IP addresses used for piracy.

However, independent studies of the Piracy Shield system have shown that hundreds of legitimate websites were also affected by the blocks, while pirate resources continued to bypass the restrictions.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince called the fine “unjust” and accused Italy of attempting to introduce internet censorship. He said the company is required to block any resource within 30 minutes of receiving a notice if it is deemed unacceptable by what he described as “media elites.” Prince added that Cloudflare plans to raise the issue with the U.S. government and remains open to dialogue with Italian authorities, but so far has only received penalties.

Among the possible responses Cloudflare is considering are ending free cybersecurity services in Italy, including those provided for the Olympics, closing its local office, and even removing its servers from the country and halting infrastructure investments.

According to AGCOM, more than 65,000 domains and around 14,000 IP addresses have been blocked in Italy under the Piracy Shield law over the past two years. Italian authorities had previously also required Google to block pirate websites at the DNS level.