Google Receives Piracy Shield Orders to Block Pirate Sites in Public DNS
Italy’s telecom regulator AGCOM has started enforcing its “Piracy Shield” system by obtaining court orders to compel Google to block pirate site domains at the DNS level on its public resolver (8.8.8.8) “promptly” after being relayed requests via the Piracy Shield platform. In late May, ahead of key Serie A matches, roughly 988 domains and 78 IPs linked to piracy were flagged, and Google complied by refusing to resolve them—effectively making the pirate sites inaccessible to users of its DNS. This marks a significant escalation extending blocking from traditional ISPs to DNS operators, closing a known circumvention route. Transparency, however, remains low: there’s no public list of blocked domains, and users receive standard DNS failures without indication of why—unlike Cloudflare, which uses HTTP 451 messages. AGCOM intends to expand this regime to require near-real-time compliance from all DNS, VPN, or intermediary services—potentially triggering heavy fines—and urges broader measures like blocking pirate apps as part of a comprehensive anti-piracy crackdown.
