Italy fines Cloudflare EUR 14M for ‘refusal to block’ pirate sites

Italy’s Agcom, at its December 29 meeting, announced last week that it imposed a penalty of more than EUR 14M against the company Cloudflare (NET). “The Authority had ordered Cloudflare to disable access to a series of pirated content in implementation of the provisions of the Anti-Piracy Law 93/2023. In particular, the Company was asked, as a service provider of the information society involved in the accessibility of illegally disseminated content, to provide for the disabling of the DNS resolution of domain names and the routing of network traffic to the IP addresses reported by the rights holders through the Piracy Shield platform, or in any case to take the technological and organizational measures necessary to make the contents disclosed abusively unusable by end users. In particular, the Authority has established the continuing violation of the anti-piracy law and the related implementation provisions Agcom by Cloudflare which, even after the notification of the order, has continued not to take any measures to counter the use of its services for the dissemination of illicit content.”