In December 2023, Italy’s communications regulatory authority AGCOM deployed Piracy Shield, a piracy detection and case ticketing platform, with the good intention to reduce access to illegal distribution over the Internet by detecting illegal instances and communicating them to Internet service providers, which must respond within 30 minutes. The platform was initially developed for the Italian football league, which donated the platform to AGCOM.
Over the course of 2024, there were many reports that Piracy Shield was signaling for site blocking against legitimate commercial Web sites, which had an impact on those businesses. AGCOM’s President defended its activities and positioned Piracy Shield as a work in progress that was undergoing continuing improvement through fine-tuning.
Commissioner protests
In November, AGCOM Commissioner Elisa Giomi could no longer maintain her silence, and issued two lengthy statements on LinkedIn. Her first statement was to distance herself from the position taken by the President at a government hearing, which he had not shared or discussed with the AGCOM council.
While she reaffirmed the legitimacy of purpose for Piracy Shield, she took strong exception to the Predident’s position that the platform required re-engineering to keep up with evolution, saying instead that the level of errors it generated did not meet regulatory requirements. Errors were “not attributable to defects in (piracy) reports…but to the functioning of the platform itself. She also criticized the donation of the platform to AGCOM, saying that AGCOM should have acquired it by using the national purchasing center. She also had the opinion that the donor of the platform did so for commercial interests, not out of ‘charity.’
After receiving reactions to that post, she issued a second statement that further reflected and clarified the issues. One observation was that AGCOM “risks unintentionally limiting freedom of expression” and engaging in censorship. Another was that there is limited consistency in the way regulators follow process. Third was that the “Piracy Shield affair” underscores the importance of giving space “even to minority voices.” She noted that her criticisms “earned (her) an ascertainment of violation of the code of ethics.”
A little history
In March, the platform blocked IP addresses belonging to Cloudflare, which blocked traffic to a telecom company and to a volunteer group. One ISP had to exit the Italy market because it could not afford to meet AGCOM’s requirements. In October, the platform blocked access to Google Drive and to YouTube back-end services. A third party has set up a search engine to find cases blocked by Piracy Shield.
“False positives” are difficult to report to AGCOM.
Requests for transparency by an association of Italian ISPs, ASSOprovider, which criticized AGCOM for not disclosing any details about its technical countermeasures, and that some of the inhibitions placed by Piracy Shield had not been piracy-related at all, were rebuffed and the association was fined.
ASSOProvider claimed that it stood on principle because AGCOM was requesting information that they already have, while AGCOM seemed to say that attempts by outsiders to ‘look behind the curtain’ represents obstruction. It was a moot point because Piracy Shield’s source code had been posted on Github a week earlier, at the end of March.
Further reading
Statement #1 post by Elisa Giomi, Commissioner at AGCOM Italian Independent Regulator. November 14, 2024. LinkedIn.
Statement #2 post by Elisa Giomi, Commissioner at AGCOM Italian Independent Regulator. November 20, 2024. LinkedIn.
Italy’s ‘Piracy Shield’ misfires, blocks Google Drive in anti-piracy blunder. Article. October 21, 2024. by Mike Masnick. Techdirt.
Italy: AGCOM fines ASSOProvider over Piracy Shield in political back-and-forth. Article. by Steven Hawley. April 5, 2024. Piracy Monitor
The boy who cried wolf? False positives blocked by Italy’s Piracy Shield. Article. by Steven Hawley. March 4, 2024. Piracy Monitor
Italy: Regulator deploys Piracy Shield site-blocking ticketing system, a work in progress. Article. by Steven Hawley. December 10, 2023. Piracy Monitor
Why it matters
Piracy Shield has experienced a less than perfect first year in service, marred both by technical flaws and by political wrangling between AGCOM and its constituencies, and within the agency itself as well.
Meanwhile, a Commissioner who surely had hoped that exposing the internal situation of Piracy Shield could help lead to some correction, she instead was criticized for speaking up.
