On January 9, 2026, the Italian Communications Authority (AGCOM) slapped Cloudflare with a staggering 14 million euro (roughly 114 million yuan) fine. The reason? Cloudflare's failure to adhere to an administrative directive requiring it to block pirated content via the 'Anti-Piracy Shield' platform. AGCOM reached this decision on December 29, 2025, and went on to make a public announcement on January 8, 2026. In Italy, DNS service providers such as Cloudflare are legally bound to disable DNS resolution and halt network traffic routing for IP addresses that are reported to be hosting illegal content. AGCOM discovered that, despite a preliminary enforcement resolution being issued as far back as February 2025, Cloudflare had not implemented the requisite technical or organizational steps to block access to pirated content. In response, Cloudflare declared that it would legally challenge the penalty. Additionally, it issued a warning that it might pull out all servers it had deployed in Italian cities.