Study: Italian Piracy Shield risks outweigh intended benefits
October 15, 2025
By Colin Mann
An academic paper, prepared in advance of an international conference on network and service management, suggests that Italy’s Piracy Shield causes significant collateral damage.
In the paper, 90th Minute: A First Look to Collateral Damages and Efficacy of the Italian Piracy Shield, the University of Twente researchers, Raffaele Sommese, Anna Sperotto, Antonio Prado, Jeroen van der Ham, Antonia Affinito, note that in the fight against illegal football streaming, Italy introduced Piracy Shield, a platform through which copyright holders can notify the national regulator (AGCOM), which in turn orders ISPs to block infringing resources – such as IP addresses and Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs) – within 30 minutes.
In the paper, they present the first investigation into the platform’s real-world impact by reconstructing and analysing its blocking activity. “Our analysis shows that the platform causes significant collateral damage. Indiscriminate IP-level blocking has disrupted and continues to disrupt hundreds of legitimate, non-streaming websites,” they say. “At the same time, the platform’s effectiveness may have been undermined by streamers who evaded enforcement by migrating to new infrastructure and unfiltered IP address space.”
Based on these findings, they call on Italian authorities and policymakers to critically reconsider the platform’s core blocking principles. “The evidence suggests that its broad impact on legitimate services and the potential national security risks outweigh its intended benefits,” they conclude.
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