In our latest episode, Raffaele Sommese of the University of Twente shares insights from him and his colleagues on Italy’s Piracy Shield and how rapid-response blocking works in practice. We get into the technical impact, how it can be measured, and the consequences for connectivity.
Raffaele is assistant professor at University of Twente’s Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science. For more details on the research he and his colleagues carried out on this topic, check out their academic paper on the impact of Piracy Shield or read the summarised version on RIPE Labs: Live-Event Blocking at Scale: Effectiveness vs. Collateral Damage in Italy’s Piracy Shield.
00:20 - Piracy Shield on the AGCOM website
00:50 - Read more about cases where Cloudflare and Google were blocked by Piracy Shield. Since recording this episode, things have escalated, with Cloudflare recently having threatened to pull out of Italy after receiving fines issued by AGCOM.
05:10 - Some background on the law behind Piracy Shield
10:20 - Watch Raffaele's talk on this topic from RIPE 91 (Bucharest, October 2025)
16:40 - AGCOM website for checking blocked resources and an alternative page run by Infotech (an Italian ISP)
42:30 - A 2025 article on anti-piracy developments in Spain
46:50 - More on Piracy Shield's expansion to TV
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