Piracy Shield Crisis Erupts as AGCOM Board Member Slams Huge Toll on Resources

Critics of Italy's Piracy Shield are not difficult to find but, with its powerful and influential proponents rarely far away, getting heard is a considerable challenge. Not to mention getting anything done. After calling for the platform's suspension and meeting resistance in the wake of the recent Google Drive blocking blunder, AGCOM board member Elisa Giomi has gone public with a laundry list of concerns. It pulls zero punches.

piracy-shield-planet-s RIPE NCC, the regional Internet registry (RIR) for Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Central Asia, currently has over 10,000 members, typically Internet service providers and telecoms organizations.

The organization’s latest meeting, RIPE89, ran for three days last week and was open to all. A presentation by Massimiliano “Max” Stucchi titled: Blocking and Censoring the Italian Internet for Football Reasons, told the story of how “a small group of (influential) people can convince a country to implement draconian filtering rules…and how this can easily go wrong, all in the name of football.”

RIPE89

The presentation made no mention of RIPE, but Piracy Shield looks a bit like its evil twin. One of RIPE’s most important roles is to allocate IP addresses to promote connectivity. Piracy Shield has spent months attempting to render thousands of IP addresses useless.

While RIPE welcomes all in the spirit of sharing, Piracy Shield and transparency are complete strangers. This admittedly comes in handy when Cloudflare and other innocent IPs are blocked in error. The upside is that, when ISPs see an unusual blocking technique, they get to name it.

New Blunders Revealed

One intriguing example mentioned by Max is Inception Blocking and here’s how it works.

When internet users try to access a resource blocked by Piracy Shield, they are directed to their ISP’s blocking page which explains why the resource has been blocked. Inception Blocking is when the IP address of the ISP’s block page somehow finds itself on the Piracy Shield blocklist, meaning that it can’t be accessed either.

There’s no blocking page for blocking pages just yet, but should one eventually exist, it must be blocked in 30 minutes or less, presumably.

Max’s presentation further revealed that Imperva Incapsula IP addresses were also blocked as part of the blunder that blocked Google Drive on October 19th. That event, which has been confirmed as a DAZN error, has also impacted RIPE Atlas, a system designed to measure internet connectivity. There are concerns that devices attempting to access a blocked pirate site may be monitored and since fines of up to 5000 euros are said to be in the pipeline, some probe operators prefer not to take risks.

Don’t Criticize Piracy Shield Too Much?

At the end of the presentation (link below), audience members were invited to ask questions. Tom Strickx, Principal network engineer at Cloudflare, took to the mic and thanked Max for his presentation. He then made an interesting observation, before summing up the whole situation in a few words.

“Thanks first of all for talking about this. It’s probably the first time I have seen anybody talk about this,” Strickx said, making a point with this finger. “Note: this is absolute fucking bullshit,” he added to slightly nervous laughter in the room.

Max lives in Switzerland these days, not Italy, so on one level his calm response was expected. On a more unsettling level, we’ve been hearing similar comments for a while now.

“The thing is, I decided to do [the presentation] because I don’t live in the country,” Max responded. “I have a little bit more freedom.”

A similar point was raised by another speaker later on. “So this thing is obviously bad, but why are you – somebody from outside Italy – doing this presentation, why isn’t some Italian ISP? Is it illegal at this point?”

Max assured the speaker that talking about Piracy Shield isn’t illegal in Italy, and suggested that while he selected it as a topic, it may be that others did not, or just didn’t have the time.

“Because since it’s going on for almost one year,” the audience member continued, “there should be a massive..[response].”

Since the launch of Piracy Shield, at least two local people familiar with the difficulties in Italy have hinted to us that there might be implications for saying or doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. When pressed to explain, one simply asked to move on. The other refused to go into detail but briefly said that one day things may run smoothly and then by coincidence, perhaps not so smoothly in the future.

Google Drive Blunder Emboldens Critics

Who or what that alludes to is difficult to pin down, but there’s little doubt that piracy, blocking, politics, and high level sports are complicating an already complex landscape. With proponents of the project seemingly convinced that only escalation will produce results, things have been heading in the wrong direction for a while. The fact that more people are starting to speak out in opposition seems unlikely to deter that.

ISP association ASSOprovider, an opponent of Piracy Shield and those behind it since the very beginning, has been fighting for transparency and accountability through various legal routes. In April, instead of supplying the information ASSOprovider had requested, AGCOM fined the association for not providing information on the ISPs it represents, information ASSOprovider insisted was already in AGCOM’s possession.

In the wake of the Google Drive debacle, an undeterred ASSOProvider has just filed a complaint with the Regional Prosecutor’s Office of the Court of Auditors of Rome. The complaint hopes to “ascertain the existence of any financial damage and the appropriateness of AGCOM’s actions in the management of the economic resources relating to the Piracy Shield.”

President of Assoprovider, Giovanbattista Frontera, is calling for a full review of the Piracy Shield system and guarantees to prevent future errors.

“We ask for transparency and responsibility in the use of public resources and in the management of a system that significantly impacts the Italian internet network,” Frontera notes.

A Dissenting Voice Inside Italy’s Telecoms Regulator

An intriguing development inside AGCOM itself seems highly significant, especially as momentum builds against the platform and the support it continues to receive from government and regulator AGCOM.

Until now, comments attributable to anyone at AGCOM about Piracy Shield have been overwhelmingly in its favor, even when established facts on the ground supported a much tougher reading of significant failures.

That the first dissenting comments come from an accomplished, highly credible individual, who appears to have gone out on a limb for something she believes in, make this very interesting. The fact that these are the words of an AGCOM board member, may represent a watershed moment.

By decree of the President of the Republic, Elisa Giomi was appointed to the board of AGCOM in September 2020, yet that accomplishment is merely a footnote according to her extensive profile on the AGCOM website.

As the author of over 70 publications for major Italian and international publishing houses and for Italian and foreign peer-reviewed journals, there’s no doubt that Giomi gave this post on X considerable thought before going public (translated).

Elisa Giomi
In a post on LinkedIn, Commissioner Giomi goes further still, before courageously heading out into uncharted territory.

‘Piracy Shield, Public Resources And Football Hypnosis’

Giomi reveals that after the blocking of Google Drive, she proposed a temporary suspension of Piracy Shield. One of five commissioners at AGCOM, Giomi’s proposal was voted down. Further detail appears in a Corriere (paywall) interview.

“In recent days I have had to distance myself from the position of my colleagues on the Piracy Shield platform. I did it because I found myself faced with a context of total underestimation of the very serious episode of Saturday 19 October..,” Commissioner Giomi explains.

“I asked for the immediate suspension of the operation of the platform in order to avoid worse consequences. The majority of the Council, however, chose to continue. The creation of the platform is imposed on [AGCOM] by law, but we cannot continue to hide the failure of the Piracy Shield initiative, which I had predicted, so much so that I expressed my opposition from the beginning.”

The Commissioner reveals the extent of her opposition on LinkedIn, noting that “amid the often virulent reactions of colleagues” she had voted against the platform at all stages for the last two years. Giomi also criticizes the language used to justify the existence of Piracy Shield and the regime it supports.

“I also want to distance myself from the rhetoric that continues to justify this initiative in the name of a generic imperative to legality, as if the fight against criminal phenomena in a country like ours was reduced to the (important, of course) fight against piracy and the latter was in turn reduced to preventing the illegal decryption of football matches,” Giomi notes

“Do you know how many public resources the failed piracy shield is draining in terms of time and personnel?”

Unchartered Territory

Criticism of Piracy Shield itself is perhaps the easiest way to show opposition to a broken system. Much more rare is a whole list of concerns, starting with how it came to exist, apparently without obvious consideration of alternatives.

“The ambiguity of the donation of the platform to AGCOM by [Serie A], which is a party to the matter, being one of the very few subjects entitled to report; the very hasty timing with which the Council decided on its adoption; the total lack of transparency in the attribution of external consultancy on the goodness of the initiative; the resistance to carrying out a survey of alternative solutions available on the market; the uncertain and late remedies with which they have tried in vain to resolve the continuous problems; the usual leakage of sensitive information on ongoing proceedings that now accompanies all the most important decisions of this council, moreover in the total inertia of those who should ensure confidentiality.”

Some of these concerns have been mentioned previously but never from someone in such a unique position, seemingly prepared for all the right reasons, to lay it all on the line, without commercial concerns being anywhere near the equation. Such qualities are increasingly rare and deserve every available protection.

“If we woke up from the collective hypnosis that blinds us every time we talk about football, overshadowing the real aberrations – such as fines of up to 5000 euros for a single user or the tolerance towards advertising of gambling for teams – perhaps we could bring everything back into due proportion and above all recognize that the priorities of the Italian institutional agenda are different,” Giomi concludes.