Italy's Piracy Shield sports piracy crackdown has scaled into a website-blocking system that reaches tens of thousands of destinations, and the most detailed technical measurement of it, published in September 2025 by RIPE Labs, found the platform blocking 10,918 IPv4 addresses and 18,849 domains as of June 2025. The RIPE Labs research counted more than 500 confirmed websites unrelated to streaming caught in those blocks, a number that grew into the thousands over time. For anyone running an app, a site, or a cloud service reachable from Italy, that's the part worth sitting with: Piracy Shield doesn't only block pirate streams.
Italy's rapidly expanding website-blocking system has produced documented collateral outages, including a Google Drive disruption and a separate Cloudflare-linked incident, both detailed below. There's also a possible evasion path, where a share of blocked domains started resolving to a different type of internet address researchers say may let some operators dodge the block, though the data can't say how many did so on purpose.
What the available evidence doesn't establish is whether any of this has actually reduced live sports piracy. AGCOM has published its own block counts, and they're worth including before drawing that conclusion, but a count of blocks isn't the same as a measured drop in piracy.
Italy's 2023 sports streaming piracy law requires internet providers to block IP addresses or domains identified in qualifying infringement reports within 30 minutes of notification, a requirement extended to VPN and DNS providers in 2024 and to other live audiovisual content in 2025.
France runs a comparable system: its regulator ARCOM reported blocking 3,797 domains in 2024, a 146% increase from the year before, according to Piracy Monitor's coverage of ARCOM's annual report.
RIPE Labs' report is among the clearest independent technical measurements of Italy's system, which makes it worth examining in detail instead of taking either side's word for how well it works.
Why Italy built its 30-minute sports piracy blocking law
Italy's crackdown didn't start from nothing. In late 2024, Italian authorities dismantled an illegal IPTV network reportedly serving more than 22 million users and generating upwards of €3 billion in annual revenue, figures cited by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
The problem isn't unique to Italy, either. Across Europe and the UK, more than 17 million people reportedly pay roughly €5 a month for pirate IPTV services, generating over €1 billion in illicit revenue every year.
France's ARCOM estimated that sports-sector piracy cost rights holders €290 million in 2023, equal to roughly 15% of legal sports-platform and broadcaster revenue that year. That figure is ARCOM's own estimate for France, not a direct measurement of Italy's losses.
There's a safety angle too, relevant to anyone tempted by one of those cheap pirate IPTV subscriptions. ITIF cites research associating pirate-site use with greater exposure to malware and other security threats. Those findings describe reported associations, not proof that every illegal streaming service poses the same risk.
These figures come from different kinds of sources: a government regulator in ARCOM's case, and a policy research group in ITIF's, each presenting piracy evidence through different methods, so the specific numbers shouldn't be read as cross-verified against each other.
Taken together, though, they describe a commercial-scale problem. What deserves scrutiny is whether the remedy Italy built treats everyone caught in its path fairly.
How Italy's sports piracy blocking law actually works
Piracy Shield is an automated incident-reporting and ticketing system. It was originally built for Lega Serie A, Italy's top football league, which later donated the platform to AGCOM.
When a rights holder files a qualifying report, internet providers get 30 minutes to block the listed IP address or fully qualified domain name (FQDN), with little opportunity to independently verify the report before acting.
That speed is exactly what makes shared infrastructure risky. The Google and Cloudflare incidents detailed below both illustrate how blocking an address associated with suspected piracy can affect unrelated services using the same infrastructure.
The law has also expanded since it first passed. An amendment in 2024 permits blocking IP addresses or domains used predominantly, rather than exclusively, for infringement. Researchers have questioned how that threshold is interpreted in practice.
The same rapid-blocking model was extended to VPN and DNS providers in 2024. In July 2025, AGCOM extended Piracy Shield to all live audiovisual content, beyond its original focus on sports.
Each expansion widened the range of services and content covered by the system.
The Piracy Shield Google Drive and YouTube block
The clearest example of what can go wrong happened in October 2024. A rights holder filed a blocking request involving Google's infrastructure, disrupting Google Drive access in Italy for several hours. Researchers also reported effects on services associated with YouTube's back-end infrastructure.
AGCOM itself acknowledged the erroneous Google Drive block and formally warned DAZN, the accredited reporting party, to exercise greater diligence when submitting blocking requests.
The block was lifted several hours later, but researchers reported that DNS caching caused effects to persist into the following day. That lag matters practically: an outage tied to a block doesn't necessarily clear the moment AGCOM reverses it.
That incident wasn't isolated. In March 2024, Piracy Shield blocked Cloudflare IP addresses, reportedly disrupting an unrelated telecom company and a volunteer organization that had nothing to do with piracy.
Because AGCOM doesn't provide a downloadable public blocklist, confirming the full scope of these incidents has depended partly on outside researchers reconstructing the blocking history.
AGCOM does, however, offer tools to check individual blocked resources, so the list isn't entirely inaccessible.
Even inside AGCOM, the criticism has been pointed. In late 2024, commissioner Elisa Giomi warned that the platform risked unintentionally restricting freedom of expression and criticized how the system handled blocking errors.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association also raised concerns about the platform's safeguards and the potential conflict of interest arising from its origins in the football industry.
Those objections have continued into 2026. Cloudflare announced in March that it was appealing a €14 million fine imposed by AGCOM over its refusal to participate in Piracy Shield. Cloudflare argues that the system's blocking obligations conflict with European legal protections, while AGCOM continues to defend its anti-piracy framework.
The dispute is ongoing, and Cloudflare's position should not be mistaken for a final legal ruling against Piracy Shield.
AGCOM now publishes a procedure for complaints against blocking decisions, including a 10-day deadline. Filing a complaint does not automatically suspend the block, however, and critics continue to question whether the available remedies are sufficiently timely and transparent.
The research also reported that at least one ISP left the Italian market because it couldn't afford to meet AGCOM's technical requirements for participating in the system.
Does the evidence show Italy's sports piracy crackdown is working?
Four separate questions tend to get blurred together when people argue about whether blocking "works."
Does a block stop access to the listed destination? Do blocked viewers shift to another pirate source instead? Do they shift to legal services? And is the collateral damage, the Google and Cloudflare incidents included, an acceptable cost of chasing speed?
The evidence for each is uneven, and some of it cuts in AGCOM's favor.
Does blocking stop access to the listed site?
AGCOM's own figures are the closest thing to direct evidence of reach.
Covering three months of operation between February and May 2024, the regulator's annual report said Piracy Shield responded to more than 1,000 takedown requests for live sports programming and disabled 18,879 FQDNs and 4,006 IP addresses tied to illegal live-sports broadcasts.
By June 2025, AGCOM reported approximately 55,504 blocks, including 44,602 FQDNs and 10,902 IP addresses.
Those are substantial numbers of blocked destinations, but they measure enforcement activity, not outcomes. They don't say whether those sources stayed down, came back under new addresses, or whether viewers found them anyway.
General blocking research backs up the idea that blocks can work at scale, just not for Italy's live-sports system specifically.
MUSO's analysis of more than 3,000 domains blocked under court orders between late 2014 and early 2023 found that over 57% saw little or no traffic afterward. A separate 2024 study by Reis and colleagues found that DNS-based blocking reduced BitTorrent download traffic by at least 16%, according to ITIF.
Both studies evaluate blocking broadly, not Piracy Shield, and neither directly measures the platform's effect on live sports piracy, which may behave differently because the value of a stream is concentrated around a single event.
Do viewers move to another pirate source?
This is where the Piracy Shield-specific evidence leans toward a workaround, not suppression.
RIPE Labs researchers found that the platform filters IPv4 addresses and FQDNs, with no evidence of IPv6 address filtering in their measurements, despite IPv6 support being available.
They also found that 1,568 blocked domains, 23.6% of the group studied, started resolving to IPv6 addresses after being blocked.
The researchers said that pattern suggests some operators may be using IPv6 to evade blocking, though it doesn't prove deliberate evasion for every domain in that group.
The findings also showed domains moving to different IPv4 addresses after being blocked, complicating efforts to keep pace with operators changing infrastructure.
Do they switch to legal services?
Whether viewers are actually moving to paid subscriptions is thin and contested.
A CDN executive in Italy pointed to roughly flat year-over-year traffic to DAZN's site as evidence that Piracy Shield had little effect, though the same reporting notes a €4 price increase during that comparison period.
France offers a similar caution. ARCOM reports illicit consumption falling from 26% to 24% since 2020 and attributes part of that decline to the growth of legal streaming options, while acknowledging that VPN use complicates measurement.
Even where blocking volume is high, the trend underneath it stays uncertain.
What is the cost of false positives?
This is the question Italy's independent technical evidence answers most directly, and not in the crackdown's favor.
RIPE Labs' June 2025 measurements confirmed more than 500 unrelated websites caught in blocking activity, a number that grew into the thousands over time, on top of the separately documented Google and Cloudflare incidents.
The researchers identified 6,712 domains fully affected and another 402 partially affected by blocks, although those figures shouldn't all be treated as confirmed legitimate websites.
Because AGCOM provides individual lookups rather than a comprehensive downloadable blocklist, outside researchers have faced limitations in reconstructing the full history.
Calling the documented collateral damage an overall "error rate" would overstate what's measurable here.
Lay these four questions side by side and a pattern emerges, rather than a verdict.
AGCOM can point to real numbers for volume: tens of thousands of FQDNs and IP addresses disabled. What's missing is strong evidence connecting that volume to less live-sports piracy specifically, while collateral blocking and IPv6 migration patterns are documented.
The gap is between a system that clearly does something and a system that's been shown to do what it was built for.
What to do if a service goes dark during a match
None of this is a reason to go looking for a workaround.
If a cloud service, app, or site used in Italy becomes unreachable during a live sporting event, check that provider's own status page and your internet provider's public notices first, rather than assuming a device problem or resetting a router.
If access returns for other people before it does for you, treat that as consistent with DNS caching rather than confirmed proof of it, and give it time once those other sources show the outage is resolving.
If you operate an affected website or service, AGCOM provides a resource lookup and a formal complaint process through its Piracy Shield information page. Complaints generally must be filed within 10 days of the block and do not automatically suspend it.
Three improvements would make this model easier to evaluate: comprehensive public reporting of blocked resources, faster correction of mistaken blocks, and independent evidence measuring Piracy Shield's actual effect on live-sports piracy rather than relying on enforcement totals or one company's traffic comparison.
Until those exist, the practical move is the same one that applies to any dynamic blocking system, in Italy or anywhere else it gets copied: check the provider's status page and the ISP's notices first, and don't assume a block, or a device problem, without something to confirm it.
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