Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is warning he could pull free cybersecurity support from Italy’s Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics and even scale back in the country after a regulator slapped it with a fine of about €14 million.
Italy’s Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni hit the company for failing to comply with anti-piracy blocking orders tied to the Piracy Shield law. The penalty is roughly one per cent of Cloudflare’s global annual revenue, yet it is more than twice what it made from Italy in 2024.
At the centre of the row is Piracy Shield’s demand for speed. It requires internet service providers and DNS operators to block sites within 30 minutes of receiving blocking requests from copyright holders.
Prince is treating that like an attempt to outsource enforcement to whoever shouts loudest, then punish anyone who refuses to do it at sprint pace. Prince claimed that “a quasi-judicial body” was administering a “scheme to censor the Internet” on behalf of “a shadowy cabal of European media elites.”
He is signalling that Cloudflare could make Italy feel the weight of its infrastructure decisions. Prince said Cloudflare may discontinue free services for Italian users, remove servers from Italian cities and cancel plans to build an Italian office, Prince said.
The Olympics threat is the spikiest part because Cloudflare’s freebies often sit in front of websites as a basic shield against DDoS attacks and other online nastiness. If that cover disappears, smaller organisations get left paying more or taking more hits, while pirates keep doing what they do.
Italy argues it is fighting live sports piracy, where the value is gone by the time a court order has finished its espresso. That is why the law leans on rapid blocks and why DNS and network operators are being dragged into it.
Cloudflare is pushing back because fast blocking can be sloppy when it is automated and rushed. Mistakes can knock legitimate services offline, and once the block lists start flying, “sorry” does not put the traffic back.
There is also a precedent problem for Cloudflare and anyone else running network infrastructure across borders. If one regulator can fine an intermediary for failing to join a rapid-blocking system, others will copy the model and call it progress.
Prince’s language is meant to make this sound like an internet governance fight, not a squabble about pirated streams. He is betting that being forced into a 30-minute takedown pipeline will look less like law enforcement and more like policy laundering.
