Italy's communications regulator AGCOM fined Cloudflare 14.2 million euros for failing to block access to pirated websites through the 1.1.1.1 DNS service. The company has responded to the requests.
At AGCOM's request, Cloudflare was required to disable access to domains and IP addresses that the copyright holder deemed to be infringing copyright within 30 minutes of notification. The company refused to comply with this request, arguing that filtering hundreds of billions of DNS requests each day would slow down the Internet and could impact legitimate websites.
The regulator rejected these arguments and imposed a fine of 1% of Cloudflare's annual revenue. In response, the company's CEO, Matthew Prince, called the law a form of Internet censorship without trial, transparency or appeal. He said Cloudflare would fight the fine and was considering shutting down operations in Italy, including removing servers and ending free services, which would slow down the Internet.
We are monitoring developments.
