A regulator asks for openness it doesn't practice
On June 23, 2026, at a Fapav-organized industry summit in Rome, Communications Undersecretary Alberto Barachini told web intermediaries that "the piracy shield works if everyone collaborates," arguing that opacity from some platforms undermines Italy's fight against piracy and that enforcement needs to move "beyond the logic of fines" (Ansa). It is a reasonable-sounding ask. It is also more than a little rich coming from the operator of Piracy Shield, the automated blocking platform that itself runs with almost none of the transparency Barachini is demanding from private companies.
The system Barachini is defending
Piracy Shield was created under Law 93/2023, which took effect in August 2023 and gave AGCOM, Italy's communications regulator, expanded powers to fight live-event piracy. AGCOM's implementing decision, Delibera 189/23/CONS of July 26, 2023, requires that once a rightsholder flags a domain or IP address as "primarily intended for illicit distribution" of protected content, ISPs and mobile carriers — TIM, Vodafone, WindTre and others — must block it within 30 minutes, through a single automated platform (AGCOM). In July 2025, Delibera 209/25/CONS extended the same rapid-block regime from live sports alone to all live audiovisual content (AGCOM).
The case for it is real. Fapav-commissioned research presented at the same June event put 2025 piracy losses at €2.3 billion in revenue, €902 million in lost GDP, €408 million in uncollected tax, and roughly 11,100 jobs foregone — with live sports piracy alone up 47% over two years to €419 million in damages (Ansa). Live sports piracy is genuinely time-sensitive in a way ordinary copyright infringement isn't: a blocking order that takes weeks to execute through courts is worthless against a stream that ends when the match does. A fast, standardized mechanism to cut off piracy domains mid-broadcast is not an unreasonable regulatory instinct, and the modest year-on-year decline in piracy rates — 37% of Italians engaged in it in 2025, down 4 points from 2024 — suggests the platform is not doing nothing.
Where speed becomes a liability
The problem is what a 30-minute, no-appeal blocking window does when it's wrong — and it has been wrong often enough to be a pattern rather than an accident. Because Piracy Shield blocks IP addresses as well as domains, and thousands of unrelated sites frequently share infrastructure with a single flagged target, the system has repeatedly taken down services that had nothing to do with piracy. Google Drive was rendered inaccessible to Italian users for more than 12 hours after being swept into a block; Ukrainian government sites for schools and scientific research were cut off; European NGOs serving women and children lost access. A University of Twente study from September 2025 found the pattern wasn't isolated — legitimate websites were routinely left blocked for months at a stretch (Cloudflare).
Cloudflare's own confrontation with AGCOM illustrates the stakes. After refusing to filter its public 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver under AGCOM's February 2025 order, the company was fined €14.2 million in January 2026 — a penalty AGCOM calculated against Cloudflare's global revenue rather than its Italian earnings, which Cloudflare says inflated the fine roughly a hundredfold above what Italian law otherwise caps administrative penalties at (TorrentFreak). Cloudflare appealed in March 2026, arguing Piracy Shield lacks judicial oversight — blocking decisions are made by private rightsholders and an automated platform, not a judge — offers no public accounting of who requested a given block or why, and provides no meaningful way for a wrongly blocked site to get relief (Cloudflare).
The transparency gap runs both ways
That is the context that makes Barachini's June 23 remarks land oddly. Asking Cloudflare, Google, or other intermediaries to be more forthcoming about how they handle blocking requests is a fair conversation to have — companies operating critical network infrastructure in a democracy do owe some public accountability. But AGCOM has not published aggregate data on how many domains and IPs Piracy Shield has blocked, how many were later found to be erroneous, or how disputed blocks get resolved; the only public-facing tool is a lookup database at blocchips.agcom.it, not a transparency report. A regulator that wants intermediaries to open their books on enforcement requests should be willing to open AGCOM's own book on enforcement errors first.
What proportionate would look like
None of this requires scrapping Piracy Shield. It requires the ordinary safeguards any due-process-minded blocking regime should have: a genuine appeals channel for wrongly blocked sites, published error rates, and a shift away from IP-based blocking — which collaterally hits every site sharing a CDN address — toward narrower, domain-specific mechanisms where technically feasible. Rome can have both a fast anti-piracy tool and a system rightsholders, ISPs, and ordinary Italians can trust wasn't just fined into silence. Right now it has neither the transparency Barachini is asking for from others, nor much reason to expect intermediaries will supply it while the regulator withholds its own.