Italy is loved by those who know it as providing a “sweet life in a beautiful country” – but, not one, at least as far as its authorities are concerned, that appears to be very tech-savvy.
Perhaps the concepts clash intrinsically – or perhaps it’s just another example of bureaucratic inadequacy brought about by politicians who should know better.
Either way, reports are now detailing the latest “anti-piracy” blunder made possible by Italy’s much-criticized Piracy Shield, this time hitting Google Drive.
The first problem is the “Piracy Shield” itself – designed as a platform bringing to life an administrative mechanism, in a way, critics say is prone to unfairly affecting otherwise innocent actors by way of “over-blocking” supposed pirated content.
A particular beneficiary – because this is Italy we’re talking about – is the top-tier football league, Serie A, and preventing unauthorized streaming of games.
But then, the regulatory scene set that way has now led to a nationwide block of Google Drive in what appears to have been another Piracy Shield-induced fiasco.
Piracy Shield lets telecom regulator AGCOM mark an IP address as responsible for piracy, and then ISPs and VPNs are under obligation to quickly block it. Having previously, in another blunder stemming from the same regulatory circumstances, done that with Cloudflare, it was now Google Drive’s turn (and reportedly, partially YouTube’s).
The target of AGCOM-ordered blocking here was drive.usercontent.google.com, apparently mistaken for a pirated content broadcasting domain. What it actually does is provide a backbone to the Drive service – meaning that during the time it was blocked, about 20% of users in Italy were still unable to access Drive, 12 hours into this.
That’s a long time for those whose work may depend on it, and given Google’s gargantuan presence in the space, that would be a lot of people in most countries.
There are alternative collaborative tools, but equally, there’s nothing to currently reassure Italians; those, too, couldn’t get blocked thanks to Piracy Shield’s many flawed provisions.
One of the most obvious ones is that ISPs can basically forward copyright holders’ blocking requests (and the list of domains up for the chop can be extensive.)
And, haste clearly makes waste.
