Research: Italy's Piracy Shield Is Just as Big a Disaster as Everyone Predicted (www.techdirt.com)

A new peer-reviewed preprint provides the first rigorous, data-driven analysis of Italy’s “Piracy Shield,” AGCOM’s automated IP/FQDN blocking regime for alleged streaming piracy. Using a leaked GitHub dataset of 10,918 IPv4 addresses and 42,664 fully qualified domain names, researchers documented pervasive collateral damage: hundreds of legitimate sites (hotels, shops, a car mechanic, an accountant, a nunnery, even Albanian sites on a single IP) were rendered unreachable from Italy. Many blocked IPs belonged to leased address space, meaning blocks persist after the lessee leaves and “pollute” address ranges for future tenants. The team even found a Google IP used by Telecom Italia to serve a block page, suggesting the blocking mechanism has at times disrupted core infrastructure. The authors stress their figures are conservative lower bounds. The study is significant because it frames Piracy Shield’s harms in technical, economic and operational terms: indiscriminate IP-level blocking damages legitimate businesses, breaks shared infrastructure like CDNs, burdens ISPs with permanent blocklists, and leaves exploitable, unusable address space that evaders can exploit. The paper urges transparency (public blocklists, immediate owner notification and fast unblocking), prefers legal takedown pathways and—if blocking is used—time-limited, event-specific FQDN filters as a last resort. These recommendations are timely as AGCOM expands the scheme to film premieres and routine TV, risking broader misuse across static web content.