Italy Imposes Record Fine on Cloudflare for Refusing to Block Pirated Content
The Italian Communications Regulatory Authority has issued an unprecedented ruling: the company Cloudflare is ordered to pay a fine of 14.2 million euros. The reason is non-compliance with requirements to restrict access to illegal content through the public DNS service 1.1.1.1. This is the largest penalty in the history of Italy's anti-piracy legislation enforcement, calculated based on the technology giant's total revenue.
The conflict originated in February 2025, when the regulator ordered Cloudflare to stop processing requests to domains and IP addresses distributing pirated materials. However, the company refused to implement blocking in its core service.
In justifying its position, Cloudflare stated that the regulator's demands were disproportionate, and that the technical implementation of filters in a system handling 200 billion requests daily was associated with significant difficulties. The company emphasized that implementing blocks would inevitably lead to a decrease in service performance. Furthermore, the DNS service 1.1.1.1 was originally created as a filtering-free solution — separate alternative addresses are provided for users wishing to restrict access to specific content.
The regulator did not accept these arguments. Following the investigation, it was determined that the company's actions violate Italian laws requiring DNS services to block pirated content. The authority stressed that Cloudflare has sufficient resources and experience to meet the requirements and does not always act solely as a neutral intermediary, having the capability to moderate traffic.
The situation is complicated by the fact that Cloudflare had previously criticized the Italian Piracy Shield system, operational since 2024. The company drew attention to the lack of transparency in the process of forming blocklists, as well as cases where, along with pirate sites, legitimate resources using the same content delivery networks became inaccessible.