The fight against IPTV to watch football for free has just intensified in Italy, while Spain and the rest of the European Union wonder whether they will have to follow in their footsteps. Although fines of up to 5,000 euros for IPTV users have not yet been officially confirmed, top telecommunications regulator AGCOM has declared victory by obtaining approval for an amendment controversial that could seriously affect both legal and illegal use of the Internet.
The amendment was presented yesterday before the Italian Senate’s budget and finance committee and approved “expressly”, as was the law it modifies which was initially presented last year. The controversial original text introduced two concepts for the fight against piracy: Piracy Shielda blocking system in just 30 minutes, and fines for IPTV users.
The effectiveness of the Piracy Shield was questioned from the first presentation of the system, and its implementation only confirmed the worst omens; not only did this not put an end to piracy in Italy, but blocked innocent pages along the way. The amendments presented aim to “resolve” these problems, with the threat of prison.
How to get started and how to collect TorrentFreakthe amendments force VPN and DNS services to block pirated contentfulfilling the same function as teleoperators. With the current Piracy Shield, it is perfectly possible to continue accessing “blocked” services, using tools such as a VPN or changing DNS settings. This is something that, apparently, those responsible for the law did not know, hence the presentation of this amendment which will force services like NordVPN, ExpressVPN, ProtonVPN and others, to block access to pages and IP addresses if private companies with football rights ordered it.
In the same way, services offering their own DNS, like Google and OpenDNSthey will have to remove entries related to blocked services. At least private DNS that users can create themselves are not affected (they were included in the first version of the amendment).
Another important change is that the law now allows block legal pages that have nothing to do with piracy; AGCOM thus wishes to avoid the legal consequences of one of the major failures of the Piracy Shield. Today, most websites do not use traditional servers, but instead rely on the “cloud”; In a server cloud, multiple pages can share the same resources, such as the same server or IP address. Therefore, blocking one IP address can block multiple pages at the same time, which is exactly what happened as soon as Piracy Shield went live.
Although AGCOM initially downplayed the situation, this law change shows that this could be a long-term problem; The amendment offers a legal shield to rights-holding companies and teleoperators block any web page and server whatever content they offer, whether it’s hacking, news, anti-government opinion pieces or cat photos.
The amendment also removes limits on the number of pages that can be blocked, one of the few anti-abuse measures included in the original text. In other words, a few private companies can now block any website in Italy and without no type of limitation.
But blocking pages is hard work, and that’s why the amendment includes one last change: teleoperators and service providers themselves will be obliged to report illegal content and the crime they detect. When one of these companies “is aware” that a crime is being committed (like a pirated football match), it is obliged to report it under penalty of a year in prison. This also includes VPNs, so those responsible for these companies face prison if they don’t turn their programs into mass spying services that detect and report any possibility of crime.
Resistance to a law created by and for football
Italy already had the toughest law against football piracy, and now it has taken an extreme step that could result in many companies “fleeing” due to the legal consequences of offering services in Italy. . The big beneficiary is Serie A, the Italian football league, which She is also the creator of the law; and that’s not an exaggeration.
Serie A president Claudio Lotito He is also a senator of the Forza Italia partyand it was he who created the amendment so that his party colleague, Dario Damiani, could sign it and present it to the Senate.
However, it seems that this time Serie A will have a little more resistance. Giovanni Zorzoni, president of the association of Internet service providers in Italy, harshly criticized the amendment, saying that AGCOM and Serie A betrayed teleoperators and “commitments and loyal collaboration in the sector”.
Zorzoni believes that the new amendment is contrary to the conclusions that operators reached with AGCOM during a meeting last year, and even warns against “new and dangerous surveillance obligations” Internet users, which would be “unconstitutional”. He also criticized the fact that the amendment was “hidden” in an independent financial law.
So far, the amendment has been voted for as part of this broader law, with 98 votes for and 88 against; From now on, the text will have to go through the Chamber of Deputies to be approved, although it will probably also do so “expressly” and without debate.
