Italy's online environment is relatively open: Freedom House scored it 74 out of 100 in Freedom on the Net 2025. Blocking is aimed at a few kinds of site: copyright piracy, illegal gambling, child sexual abuse material and terrorist content. The Customs and Monopolies Agency (ADM) blocks unlicensed gambling sites, and its public list held more than 10,400 of them in September 2024. Since July 2023, prosecutors can also order online terrorist content blocked or removed.
Piracy is where Italy is strictest. The Piracy Shield platform, run by the communications regulator AGCOM since February 2024, lets rights holders upload the IP addresses and domain names of pirate streams, particularly of live sport, and internet providers must block them within 30 minutes. More than 3,000 IP addresses were blocked in its first two months, and some blocks hit legitimate services: on 19 October 2024 Google Drive was unreachable across Italy for more than 12 hours after it was entered into the system. In October 2024 Parliament extended the duty to VPN providers and public DNS services wherever they are based, and AGCOM approved the expanded system in February 2025. In December 2025 AGCOM fined Cloudflare about 14.2 million euros for not complying with blocking orders, and in July 2026 the regional administrative court in Lazio upheld the fine.
Using a VPN remains legal, and Freedom House says the government places few restrictions on anonymous communication or encryption, though SIM cards must be registered with ID. Watching pirated content is a separate matter: under the 2023 anti-piracy law, a user faces a fine of 154 euros, rising to 5,000 euros for large quantities. In March and April 2025 the financial police fined users of pirate IPTV services in 80 provinces, after identifying 2,282 of them through their card and online payments. A VPN does not make a pirate service legal.
Data retention is long. A law passed in November 2017 requires phone and internet providers to keep traffic data for 72 months, six years, so that it is available for investigations into terrorism and organised crime; the privacy code's ordinary limits are 24 months for phone and 12 months for internet traffic. Traffic data records connections, such as IP addresses and times, not the content of messages. Italy's data protection authority said at the time that the six-year rule was in clear conflict with EU law. Since a decree of 30 September 2021, prosecutors need a judge's order to obtain the records, mostly for crimes with a maximum sentence of at least three years.
GhostShield runs a server in Milan. It gives you an Italian IP address for Italian services when you are abroad, and a short route for people in Italy. It uses standard WireGuard. Each streaming service decides for itself whether to accept VPN addresses, and DAZN says it does not support VPNs, so check the services you use during the 7-day free trial.
International Privacy Standards
Internet freedom varies significantly by country. Organizations like Freedom House track global internet freedom annually, while the EU's GDPR has set new standards for data protection worldwide. Reporters Without Borders monitors press freedom and digital access restrictions globally.
A VPN helps you maintain consistent privacy protections regardless of which country you're browsing from, ensuring your data stays encrypted and your activity stays private.
The privacy landscape in Italy
Italy belongs to SIGINT Seniors Europe, the intelligence-sharing group known as the Fourteen Eyes: the five English-speaking allies plus nine European countries, including Germany, France and Spain. A VPN does not take you out of reach of intelligence services. What it changes is what your provider and your local network can see.
Spyware is the most serious recent case. In late January 2025, about 90 people were notified that their devices had probably been targeted in 2024 with Graphite, a commercial spyware product; they included a journalist and two prominent migration activists. A parliamentary oversight committee later confirmed that the government had used Graphite against at least two of the activists. A VPN does not protect a phone that is itself compromised.
GDPR applies, and the data protection authority, the Garante, is an active enforcer, although a Rome court annulled its 15 million euro fine on OpenAI in March 2026, ruling that Ireland's regulator was responsible for the case. On public Wi-Fi, a WireGuard tunnel keeps your logins private from the network, though it does not stop a convincing fake login page.
Top reasons people use a VPN in Italy
For Italians abroad, the usual question is Italian television. RaiPlay limits much of its catalogue to Italy, because Rai's broadcasting rights generally cover only Italian territory, and it checks your IP address to decide. The Milan server gives you an Italian address; whether a particular programme plays still depends on the service's own checks.
At home, the reason is privacy from the network. With a VPN on, your provider sees one encrypted connection to the VPN server rather than the sites and services you reach, and the same applies to the Wi-Fi in hotels, stations and cafes. The public Wi-Fi guide explains how that works.
Sport is where a VPN helps least. DAZN says it does not support VPNs, because its broadcasting rights are specific to each country, and Piracy Shield exists to stop pirate streams of live matches. A VPN does not make a pirate stream legal, and Italian users of pirate services have been fined.