Italy: Cloudflare fined for anti-piracy violations
January 9, 2026
From Branislav Pekic in Rome
Italy’s telecoms regulator, the Communications Authority (AgCom), has fined the US Internet services company Cloudflare €14 million for violating anti-piracy regulations.
The fine, set at 1 per cent of the company’s global turnover, was issued because Cloudflare failed to disable access to pirated content as ordered on February 18th 2025. Cloudflare was required to block DNS resolution and network traffic to IP addresses linked to illegal content or implement other measures to make such content inaccessible.
The Authority found that Cloudflare continuously violated Anti-Piracy Law 93/2023 and related AgCom provisions, even after being notified of the order. The San Francisco-based company denies any irregularities.
The decision by AgCom reinforces the anti-piracy law, which now includes all information society service providers—such as VPNs, public DNS providers, and search engine operators—in the fight against piracy, regardless of their locations.
Since its launch in February 2024, the Piracy Shield platform has disabled over 65,000 FQDNs (Fully Qualified Domain Names) and approximately 14,000 IP addresses associated with illegal content.
Reacting to the news, Akamai CEO Tom Leighton argued that piracy has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with money flowing through criminal networks, often alongside malware, fraud, and credential theft.
“Internet piracy is a big business. Stopping it has nothing to do with protecting free speech or geopolitical concerns. It has everything to do with billions of dollars: profit made by pirates and those that enable them on the internet; and losses suffered by legitimate rights owners and ultimately the law-abiding viewers who have to pay higher prices as a result,” commented Leighton.
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