A Popular Tool, By the Numbers
Italy's anti-piracy platform Piracy Shield just posted its best public-approval numbers yet. A FAPAV/Ipsos Doxa survey presented on June 23, 2026 — timed to the two-year anniversary of the underlying law — found that 70% of Italian adults consider the system useful, rising to 77% among people who admit to pirating live sport. The same survey counted more than 100,000 websites blocked in the past year, up roughly a third on the prior period, while overall piracy consumption among Italians aged 10 and up fell to 37%, down from 41% in 2023. Rights holders will read this as vindication: a law built in 2023 to stop illegal live-sport streams is now blocking sites at scale and moving public opinion with it.
The Case For It, Fairly Stated
Before picking the system apart, it's worth crediting what it was built to solve. Live sports piracy is uniquely hard to police with ordinary takedown notices, because a stream's commercial value evaporates the moment the match ends — a notice-and-takedown process that takes days is functionally useless. Legge 93/2023, passed by Italy's parliament and in force since August 8, 2023, responded to that problem by giving AGCOM, the communications regulator, power to order blocks within 30 minutes of a rights holder's report through a single automated platform. That speed is the point, and the FAPAV/Ipsos numbers suggest it is working as theater at minimum: piracy consumption is down for a third consecutive year, and the €2.3 billion in annual economic damage FAPAV attributes to piracy — including roughly 11,100 jobs never created — is a real cost that a functioning enforcement regime should reduce. A regulator moving that fast, with that much public buy-in, is not a small achievement.
What the Approval Number Doesn't Capture
But a 30-minute automated blocking order is also a system with almost no room for verification, and the same anniversary that produced the approval survey produced an independent audit that undercuts the official success story. AGCOM's own president, Giacomo Lasorella, has cited an error rate of just 0.0057% across 122,481 reports — about seven mistaken blocks. Commissioner Elisa Giomi, the only member of AGCOM's governing board to vote against the platform's framework, has publicly disputed that figure, pointing to independent research from the University of Twente, presented at the CNSM 2025 conference, covering the platform's first sixteen months of operation. That study identified 7,114 domains wholly or partially affected by collateral blocking, including 510 confirmed legitimate sites — hotels, medical clinics, mechanics' shops — with an average outage of 320 days. Giomi has also noted that against an estimated 3.3 million illegal-streaming subscribers, 122,481 total blocks means the platform is reaching roughly 3.7% of the pirate audience it targets, a gap between enforcement volume and enforcement effect that the approval survey doesn't measure.
The mechanism behind that gap is structural, not accidental. Piracy Shield blocks by IP address and domain, and a single shared IP can host thousands of unrelated sites behind a CDN, reverse proxy, or cloud host. That is exactly what happened when AGCOM's list briefly included drive.usercontent.google.com, cutting off Google Drive access for Italian users. It is a predictable failure mode of IP-based blocking at internet scale, not a one-off glitch, and it is why an 0.0057% error rate reported by the regulator and a study finding over 7,000 affected domains can both be technically defensible — they are counting different things.
Who Actually Bears the Cost
The burden of that imprecision falls almost entirely on intermediaries who have no say in what gets blocked. EuroISPA, representing more than 3,300 European internet providers, has documented cases including a Portuguese provider losing email connectivity to its Italian customers for 16 days after an overbroad block. The trade group's core demand is straightforward: rights holders who submit imprecise blocking requests should bear liability for the resulting damage, rather than pushing the cost onto ISPs and DNS resolvers who are legally required to comply within 30 minutes with no compensation and, effectively, no appeal window before the block takes effect.
The Proportionality Gap
Italy does not need to choose between a functioning anti-piracy regime and a functioning internet — but Piracy Shield's current design asks intermediaries to absorb a risk that rights holders create and that AGCOM's own numbers understate. A system that blocks first and verifies later, with costs falling on network operators rather than the parties submitting the block requests, will keep producing headline-friendly totals and quietly accumulating collateral damage in the same year. The fix is not slower enforcement; it's shifting liability for bad requests back onto whoever files them, and giving AGCOM an independent audit function — something closer to what Commissioner Giomi has been asking her own colleagues for — before the next expansion of the platform's scope.