Italy’s blocking centres on AGCOM’s Piracy Shield, which gives providers 30 minutes to cut off pirate sports streams, alongside a customs blacklist of unlicensed gambling sites and privacy orders against AI chatbots.
Every day we open 67 of the world’s biggest sites and apps from home internet connections in Italy, and record what’s blocked, since when and how.
0 of 67 testedsites and apps with a confirmed block in Italy
67 of 67 results confirmed in the last 48 hours.
Tests are requested on TIM and Fastweb home connections.
Since February 2024 AGCOM, the communications regulator, has run Piracy Shield under a 2023 anti-piracy law: rights holders upload the IP addresses or domains of pirate streams, mostly of live sport, and internet providers must block them within 30 minutes, with site owners able to complain only afterwards. Shared addresses make mistakes costly: a blocked Cloudflare address briefly cut off tens of thousands of sites in 2024, and on 19 October 2024 part of Google Drive was blocked for hours.
Parliament widened the system in October 2024, and AGCOM approved the new rules in February 2025: VPN services and public DNS providers, not just internet providers, must carry out Piracy Shield orders within 30 minutes, and search engines must delist the sites. Providers that fail to report piracy they become aware of face up to a year in prison, and people who watch pirate IPTV can be fined up to €5,000 under the 2023 law.
Other blocklists are older. The customs and monopolies agency, ADM, keeps a public denylist of unlicensed gambling sites, over 10,400 by September 2024, and since 2019 the markets regulator CONSOB has been able to order blocks on unauthorised financial sites, 1,047 by March 2024. Italian telecoms operators said they blocked RT and Sputnik promptly when EU sanctions took effect in March 2022, and Project Gutenberg still showed signs of blocking on some providers in 2024, after a 2020 piracy investigation. The RT block works in the providers’ own name lookup (DNS), which many of our test machines don’t use, so our daily test can find www.rt.com opening.
The privacy watchdog, the Garante, has also taken on AI chatbots. Its order of 30 March 2023 led OpenAI to switch off ChatGPT in Italy for about a month, until it made changes; on 30 January 2025 it ordered DeepSeek’s Chinese owners to stop processing Italians’ data, and DeepSeek removed its app from Italian app stores while its website kept working at the time. Since 12 November 2025 AGCOM has also required age checks on porn sites, with sites based abroad given until 1 February 2026.
Are VPNs legal in Italy?
VPNs are legal in Italy but drawn into Piracy Shield: under AGCOM rules approved in February 2025, VPN services must apply its blocking orders within 30 minutes, as internet providers do.
Key dates
AGCOM’s age checks for porn sites take effect for sites based in Italy; sites based abroad get until 1 February 2026.
AGCOM approves rules extending Piracy Shield orders to VPN services and public DNS providers, with the same 30 minutes to act.
The Garante orders DeepSeek’s owners to stop processing Italian users’ data, and the app leaves Italian app stores.
A Piracy Shield order blocks part of Google Drive in Italy for several hours.
AGCOM switches on Piracy Shield, giving internet providers 30 minutes to block reported pirate streams.
The Garante orders OpenAI to stop processing Italians’ data, and ChatGPT goes offline in Italy for about a month.
Get past a block
Blocked in Italy?
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History
Changes in Italy
No confirmed changes since monitoring began on 29 Sep 2026. When a block appears or lifts, and a re-check on several machines agrees, it shows up here.
Method
How we test
Test machines on TIM and Fastweb home connections open each site’s homepage every day.
A failure counts only when it happens twice on the same network, while the site opens from other countries.
A change is published only after re-checks a few hours later and again the next day, on several machines per provider, confirm it. It’s dated from the first sighting.
Test machines caught getting around blocks, through a VPN or a filter-dodging tool, are set aside.
We test websites, mostly over home broadband. Apps, calls and mobile networks can behave differently.
No. ChatGPT was offline in Italy for about a month in 2023, after the Garante ordered OpenAI on 30 March 2023 to stop processing Italian users’ data, citing a data breach, no legal basis for training on personal data and no age checks. OpenAI restored it in April 2023 after making changes the regulator accepted.
Is DeepSeek Banned in Italy?
The Garante ordered DeepSeek’s two Chinese owners on 30 January 2025 to stop processing Italian users’ data, after they claimed European law didn’t apply to them. DeepSeek removed its app from Italian app stores, but its website kept working in Italy at the time. We found no announcement that the order has been lifted.
What Is Piracy Shield?
It is the system AGCOM, Italy’s communications regulator, has run since February 2024 against pirate live sport. Rights holders upload the addresses of illegal streams, and internet providers, plus VPN and public DNS services under rules approved in February 2025, must block them within 30 minutes. Site owners can complain only after the block.
