Why Governments Are Coming After VPNs: Italy's Piracy Shield
Italy's Piracy Shield was sold to the public as a tool to stop illegal sports streaming. It has become something much broader. Cloudflare is now appealing a €14 million fine from Italy's communications regulator, AGCOM, for refusing to participate in the system, and the fallout raises serious questions about internet censorship, government overreach, and why VPNs have ended up in the crosshairs.
What Is Piracy Shield, and Why Is Cloudflare Fighting It?
Piracy Shield is a website blocking system operated by AGCOM, Italy's communications authority. The idea is straightforward enough: identify websites hosting pirated content, particularly live sports broadcasts, and block them quickly. In practice, the system has proven far less precise.
A study published in September 2025 found that Piracy Shield routinely blocks legitimate websites alongside the ones it targets. The collateral damage includes government websites, NGO sites, and at one point, Google Drive. That last example is worth sitting with for a moment. Google Drive, a service used by millions of people for entirely lawful purposes, was swept up in a system designed to protect football rights holders.
Cloudflare refused to register with Piracy Shield and received a €14 million fine as a result. The company is now appealing that fine, arguing that the system violates the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA). Specifically, Cloudflare's position is that Piracy Shield lacks the proportionate content restrictions and procedural safeguards that the DSA requires. In other words, it blocks too much, too fast, with too little accountability.
The Expansion Nobody Should Ignore
AGCOM's response to criticism has not been to reform the system. Instead, the regulator has expanded it. Piracy Shield now targets DNS providers and VPN services, pulling them into the same compliance framework that Cloudflare refused to join.
This expansion matters because DNS providers and VPNs serve a fundamentally different purpose than, say, a web hosting company. These are tools that protect the privacy and security of ordinary users. VPNs in particular are used by journalists protecting sources, activists in hostile environments, businesses securing remote workers, and everyday people who simply do not want their browsing habits tracked by their internet service provider.
By bringing VPNs into Piracy Shield's scope, AGCOM is effectively asking privacy tools to become instruments of censorship. A VPN that must block domains on behalf of a government regulator is no longer functioning as a neutral privacy layer. It becomes a participant in the very surveillance and restriction infrastructure that many users rely on VPNs to avoid.
This is not a theoretical concern. The pressure being placed on VPN providers in Italy is part of a broader pattern seen across multiple countries, where copyright enforcement becomes the entry point for much wider controls over what people can access online.
What This Means For You
If you are based in Italy or use a VPN provider that operates there, you may already be feeling the effects of Piracy Shield. Legitimate websites you rely on could be blocked without warning and without any meaningful recourse. If your VPN provider registers with Piracy Shield and complies with its blocking orders, the privacy protection you are paying for is being quietly compromised.
More broadly, this case is a signal worth paying attention to wherever you live. When regulators in one EU member state begin pressuring VPN providers to enforce content blocks, it sets a precedent. Other regulators notice. Other governments follow.
The DSA was supposed to create a balanced framework for content moderation across the EU, one that included proper safeguards and transparency. Cloudflare's appeal is essentially an argument that Piracy Shield ignores those safeguards entirely. If that appeal succeeds, it could force a meaningful reform of how Italy, and potentially other countries, approach site blocking.
Transparency and Legal Grounding Matter More Than Ever
Not all VPN providers are in the same position when it comes to resisting regulatory overreach. How a provider is structured legally, where it is based, and how transparent it is about its policies all determine whether it can push back against demands like those coming from AGCOM.
hide.me operates with a strict no-logs policy, which has been independently audited, and is structured in a way that limits what can be compelled from us even under legal pressure. We believe that the value of a VPN depends entirely on whether it actually protects users, not just in marketing copy but in practice and under legal scrutiny.
The fight Cloudflare is taking on in Italy is worth following closely. It is about whether the open internet remains open, and whether the tools people use to protect their privacy can be conscripted into doing the opposite. If you want to understand more about how VPN encryption works and why it matters in situations exactly like this one, our guide to VPN encryption is a good place to start. You might also find our breakdown of no-logs policies useful for evaluating whether a VPN provider can genuinely protect you when it counts.