Italy’s ‘Piracy Shield’ Creating Real Problems As VPNs Start Turning Away Italian Users

How long until people will be carrying Raspberry Pis over the borders for their own hotspots? /s

It's crazy how quickly mass censorship is becoming commonplace though. From shadowbanning on Reddit and Twitter, to court blocking in the UK, Spain and Italy.

The Internet gives some power back to the people, the powers that be would love to see it crash and burn.
MFW I climb a light pole outside of the McDonald's to install my solar powered rpi jump box and find that there are already seven other solar powered rpi jump boxes up there.

MFW this is the fourth pole I've tried.
- MFW this is the fourth pole I've tried.
  
  I think the rules state that you have to show a visual depiction of said face
Why not use TOR?

AirVPN is an Italian company incorporated in Rome.

Of course they comply. 99.9% of VPN providers are however not domiciled in Italy or elsewhere in the EU, and don't give a flying fuck about Italian demands and jurisdiction.

This is a total non-issue.

Exactly: Italian companies (like AirVPN) are now forced to comply to the new law, but being a member of the EU means you cannot forbid other EU countries to sell you their products. So any Italian citizen has still the right to purchase the same service from any other Country, thus stifling their own economy.
The current Italian Government keeps fucking themself in their own ass with this kind of actions: they get bribed by big companies (in this case Comcast's Sky and DAZN) and keep putting in serious difficulties small local companies, because of their total inability to think even a single a step ahead

Permanently Deleted

How would it affect their economy?
- Reading the article: A ruling body filled with randos puts a site on a block list and every VPN operating in Italy must block the site within 30 minutes. There is no review or judicial oversight to sites added to the block list. This seems to include all forms of VPNs, including corporate ones. They could start charging a premium to Italian users which would start affecting businesses, I guess.
- Lol. It's common place for companies to use pirated software in order to reduce costs.
  Licences and subscriptions can get expensive, so when companies get forced to increase costs, they tend to fuck off somewhere else.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240229043417/https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/27/italys-piracy-shield-creating-real-problems-as-vpns-start-turning-away-italian-users/

Scarry read.
- Not really. The article mentions exactly one provider that doesn't accept Italian users... And if you look into AirVPN, you'll find that it's an Italian company... i.e. the only provider actually within the realm of Italian cease & desist orders. Nobody else cares whatsoever.

There's another one after airvpn? That was because they had the headquarters in Italy so they had no other choice.

Exactly, and it remains the only one. Clickbait, nothing else.

On the plus side, maybe more tor users?

Man, I've used AirVPN forever. Should I change now?

Id like to know as well

As an Italian... Fuck

Will this change something for italian pirates?

They will just buy a VPN from a company that isn't incorporated in Italy (airvpn is based in Italy so they were forced to do that)

And everyone in Italy need to be forced to get a VPN as we (I'm Italian) gave the keys to a few copyright trolls with no supervision or repercussions for wrong blockings.

Saturday afternoon my uptime Kuma telegram bot started to send me hundreds of notifications "your websites are down!" And I panicked. I literally had no idea what was going on. My server was ok, why I couldn't access my websites? Rebooted 5 times, still down. Cloudflare tunnels were giving a weird error. After two hours of troubleshooting and still hundreds of down notifications I just gave up. "Maybe it's an issue with cloudflare" - I thought. I disabled the telegram bot and I went to sleep.

It was the fucking copyright trolls that blocked fucking cloudflare

And no official media talked about this. When Facebook has 3 minutes of downtime, the news on TV act like Italy was cut out from the world for a week. Here the copyright trolls blocked the biggest CDN in the world for a fucking day and the media fucking ignored the issue. Not a single news about that. The block was silently removed, and it never officially happened.

I hope that this disaster triggers the EU to forbid a platform like this because this is too dangerous. What if next time instead of blocking cloudflare accidentally it's blocked "accidentally"?

I was in Italy in maybe 2013 or 2014 and every vpn ever was blocked. The only one that wasn't blocked was the one running on my home server back home. Even mcdonalds wifi in Methsota US isn't like that.

The Italian population is very old. This old generation of white man can't die fast enough

This whole thing happened while a young woman is in power. This has to do with submission to economic power, not with gender and age.
- I think from her part it was more about planting the seeds of a censorship tool than pleasing economic powers. Right-wing scum always attack freedom of speech first.
Mh, interesting, I would like to disagree