Cloudflare CEO threatens to withdraw Milano-Cortina Olympic funding after being fined by Italian communications watchdog.
Published on January 10, 2026
United States internet company Cloudflare has threatened to pull services in Italy, including the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, after being fined 14 million euros ($16m) for failing to combat online piracy.
Italy’s independent communications watchdog, Agcom, announced the fines on Thursday for “persistent violations of anti-piracy law”, specifically the failure to disable content flagged under its “Piracy Shield” system.
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The system allows rights holders of livestream events to report pirated content through an automated platform, requiring providers to block the content within 30 minutes.
In a lengthy post on X late Friday, CloudFlare chief executive Matthew Prince said there were “plans to censor the Internet.”
He said the system has “no judicial oversight”, no appeals process and no transparency, and lacks the necessary services to block content not only in Italy but globally.
Cloudflare had already launched legal challenges against the scheme and will now fight the penalty, which it called “unjust”.
He also said his company is “planning to write off millions of dollars in pro-bono cyber-security services we are providing at the upcoming Milano-Cortina Olympics”.
The prince said he would discuss the issue with US officials next week in Washington, DC, and then travel to Lausanne for talks with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which hosts the Feb. 6-22 Winter Games in northern Italy.
He warned that his company could end free cyber security services for Italy-based users, remove all servers from Italian cities and cancel plans to invest in the country.
Cloudflare is a platform that provides services including security, traffic management and optimization for websites and applications.
It claims to handle about 20 percent of global Internet traffic.
Agcom says that since its adoption in February 2024, Piracy Shield has disabled at least 65,000 fully-qualified domain names (FQDN) and approximately 14,000 IP addresses.