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Piracy Shield: When Incompetence Breaks the Internet

Written by Alessio on 2/10/2026

Last night the unthinkable—but predictable—happened: half of Italy found itself cut off from Google Drive, Discord, and dozens of other essential services. The culprit wasn't a Russian hacker, nor an undersea cable cut. It was the Italian State, through the Piracy Shield platform.

The Technical Problem

Let's skip the traffic cop analogies. Let's talk about how the internet actually works.
Piracy Shield allows rights holders (like the Serie A League) to upload IP addresses to block within 30 minutes, without prior judicial review. The problem? Cloudflare.

Cloudflare uses a technology called Anycast. A single IP address doesn't correspond to just one server, but to thousands of different sites. It's as if an entire neighborhood shared the same house number. When Piracy Shield ordered the blocking of an IP broadcasting a pirated match, it also took down everything else passing through that address: Google Drive, university sites, and critical infrastructure.

Why It's Scary

This incident proves an uncomfortable truth: those who write the laws do not understand network infrastructure.

  • Overblocking: Blocking a shared IP is using a sledgehammer to kill a fly. Collateral damage is guaranteed.
  • Lack of Accountability: Who pays for the lost work hours? Who is responsible for the damage? Right now, nobody.
  • BGP Poisoning: Technically, we are polluting national routing tables. We are fragmenting the internet based on private reports.

What Can We Do?

Technically? Very little. Changing DNS does nothing in these cases, because the block happens at the routing level (IP), not at name resolution.

The solution is political and cultural. We must stop treating the internet like cable TV. The network is a complex, fragile system. Inserting automatic filters managed by private entities into the heart of national infrastructure is not "fighting piracy." It is sabotage.

If you couldn't upload your homework to Drive yesterday, now you know why. And the worst part? It will happen again.