Piracy Shield is the blocking platform run by AGCOM, the Italian communications regulator. It has been live since February 2024. A rightsholder logs in and submits the domains and IP addresses serving an unlicensed stream, and access providers must block them within thirty minutes. The rightsholder submits, the providers block, and the clock is the whole design.
It was built around live sports, and it only makes sense in that light. A football match is worth protecting for ninety minutes. A block that lands the following week protects nothing. Thirty minutes is the number that puts the block in place before half time.
What it catches
Against the target it was built for, the system does what it says. A stream site with a fixed domain on a fixed address on a Saturday afternoon is blocked before the match ends, for every subscriber of every Italian provider at once. A viewer who found the stream through a search engine or a link in a chat group gets an error page. For a casual viewer, the effort of finding another stream while the match is running is often enough to end the attempt. That is the case for the system, and for the audience it describes, the case is real.
It also catches whatever else answers on the same address. That is the problem.
What it breaks
Blocking an IP address blocks everything behind it. Much of the web now sits behind content delivery networks and cloud hosts where one address serves many unrelated customers. Submit that address and all of them go dark for every user in Italy. Piracy Shield has produced well-reported incidents of exactly this kind: shared infrastructure blocked because an unlicensed stream was one tenant among many. A thirty-minute clock leaves no time for the check that would have caught it.
The incidents matter beyond Italy. Any regime that lets a private party impose network-wide blocks on a short clock will hit shared infrastructure eventually. Piracy Shield is the working demonstration.
Where the traffic went
Blocking works on names and addresses, so the sites stopped keeping either for long. Domain rotation, already routine, got faster: a blocked name is replaced within hours and the new one distributed through the same channels as the old, with the block itself as the prompt to move. A provider blocking a list of domains is blocking last week’s list.
The larger shift is away from the browser. An app with a community add-on, or a media centre pointed at a paid debrid account, never shows the user a domain. The addresses it uses are configuration, refreshed without the viewer’s involvement, and a blocked one is swapped before the viewer knows there was a block. Nothing in that path looks like a website, and a system built to block websites has nothing to aim at.
This is the pattern every blocking regime produces, and Italy’s fast clock only made it arrive faster. Blocking moves traffic more than it removes it. The viewer who lost a stream site on Saturday finds an app recommendation on Sunday, and the following weekend the match is playing on a phone with no domain to block. The audience did not shrink. It moved out of reach of the clock.