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Italy’s ‘Piracy Shield’ Creating Real Problems As VPNs Start Turning Away Italian Users
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
276 points (98.3% liked)
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How would it affect their economy?
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.
In poorer countries, sure.
In most 1st world countries, using pirated software is basically giving groups like FAST a licence to fuck you out of business.
Italy isn't a 1st world country. It only looks that way at the top.
It's really not.
In poor countries sure, but not the US or Europe. You will get sued and you will pay if you do that at any scale.
Lol. You think Italy is rich? The lower you go down the boot, the poorer the leather.
Remember the bridge that collapsed because the company that built it cut corners? That's the standard of business there.
The bridge was near Genova, in the North, btw. For good or for bad, Italy is still a member of g7, and despite the gazillion problems, relatively to other countries, it is a rich country.
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.
Eh, I doubt it. If the exit point is in Italy it would be going through an Italian ISP, and that ISP should be responsible for enforcing the filter, the same as it would be for a retail customer.
According to the article, it requires them to get accreditation to operate in in Italy, unless I'm reading that wrong.
Most corporate VPN companies I've dealt with would love to slip in additional cost to counteract this cost on their end.
Uh huh. So, I put a DNS server and VPN server online, and an Italian happens to find it. Is Italy going to try to extradite me or something?
Disclaimer: This is speculation, because I haven't read the actual law (and I'm not Italian, so it's not like I really have a reason to).
I would assume that they will handle it like this:
To be able to sell your VPN service in Italy, you'll have to get accredited. Since you're now taking Italian customers' money, your company's dealings in Italy fall under Italian law. They might be able to extradite you, depending on what country you operate from, but realistically most businesses don't want to get involved in that kind of stuff, because even if you don't get extradited, no one wants to be put in a situation where they need to actively avoid a country.
This leaves free VPN services, right? Well, since ISP and "legal" VPNs need to conform to the new law, the Italian government could blacklist those VPNs' websites (which all ISPs and legal VPNs are required by law to block within 30 minutes of them being added to the block list). So now, you're in an awkward position as an Italian if you want to get a VPN that doesn't follow those laws.
I'm not sure at what extent this law goes, or how they handle people who are paying to circumvent it (because you might have bought a VPN before this), but they might simply require that banks refuse to process payments from VPN providers that refuse to get accredited.
Obviously, they can't really block this thing without going the Great Firewall route (and even that has ways of being bypassed), but that's not really their goal here. Their goal is to establish a stranglehold on what the everyday citizen does. It's to put a framework in place that allows them to quickly and efficiently block content they deem you shouldn't be able to see. It's a disgusting display of a government overreaching and censoring what their citizens' have access to on the web.