Italy’s ‘Piracy Shield’ Misfires, Blocks Google Drive In Anti-Piracy Blunder

In a stunning display of technological and regulatory ineptitude, Italy’s ‘Piracy Shield’ law has managed to block access to Google Drive, apparently confusing the popular cloud storage service with a hotbed of illegal activity. Bravo, Italy, bravo.

Earlier this year, we wrote about Italy’s new “Piracy Shield” nonsense, in which the country’s telecom regulator, AGCOM, could designate certain IP addresses as “piracy” and require all internet providers and VPNs to block access to those sites. As we noted in our original article, this was already causing problems, such as when a dynamic IP address from Cloudflare was blocked, taking out legitimate sites in the process.

The structure of the Piracy Shield means that it’s almost impossible to appeal bad blocks. The focus seems to be on blocking first and dealing with the fallout later.

Earlier this month, Italy made the Privacy Shield even worse, amending the regulations to increase criminal sanctions for failing to block IP addresses AGCOM designates and expanding even further the list of VPNs and DNS services covered. It also put in place rules demanding that ISPs proactively alert AGCOM of suspected piracy or face criminal charges with potential prison sentences.

Just last week, our own Glyn Moody sent over an article he had written on Walled Culture about just how bad all of this was. I was all set to republish it here this week. But fate intervened. Over the weekend, someone alerted us to the news that AGCOM had designated Google Drive as a piracy service, and pretty much all of it was blocked in Italy for a few hours.

Italian Wired has the details (auto-translated):

On the evening of Saturday 19 October, a ticket uploaded to the system adopted by the Communications Authority (Agcom) to stamp out illegal streaming blocked a critical domain of Drive, the Big G web service used to archive and share data in the cloud, and one of the YouTube caches. Two resources that, obviously, have nothing to do with the pirate broadcasting of football matches and other sports, which is what Piracy Shield should be dealing with, but which demonstrates for the umpteenth time how the technology gifted by Serie A to Agcom ends up paving over harmless sites. Even stepping on Google’s toes.

Let’s reconstruct the facts. At least since 6:56 PM on Saturday afternoon, as demonstrated by a source to Wired through some analysis, Piracy shield has been blocking the address drive.usercontent.google.com . As Google itself explains , it is one of the critical domains for Drive. The blackout implemented by the national anti-piracy platform prevents it from being reached and, in fact, from being able to download files stored on Drive . Wired was able to verify on Piracy shield search , a project for public sharing of blacked-out domains provided by Infotech srl, the effective blocking of the domain.

The same report notes that some YouTube URLs were also listed, so part (but not all) of YouTube was blocked across Italy.

Really making a dent in piracy there, AGCOM. Great work. Bang-up job, everyone.

As Wired explains, part of the issue is that the Piracy Shield law is so stupidly written. Rights holders can file complaints with huge lists of domains they want blocked, and ISPs are then given 30 minutes to block those domains. So, you know, mistakes are made. Like blocking all of Google Drive.

There is an “allowlist” that is supposed to protect against taking down big trusted sites like Google, but apparently a key Google Drive domain wasn’t on there.

The article also notes that while a few ISPs have chosen to unblock Google Drive, many had not at the time of writing. They have strong incentives not to unblock, as ISPs are subject to costly sanctions if they unblock domains designated under the Piracy Shield.

Of course, this kind of overblocking always happens. We’ve talked about examples in the past where similarly stupid blocking demands have removed tens of thousands of sites from the internet. You would think that someone in the Italian government might recognize the problems of this approach by now?