Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics: Protecting Live Sports Rights Without Censorship

This article examines piracy in sports broadcasting through the Cloudflare–AGCOM dispute and draws out key lessons for major sporting events, highlighting the practical and contractual steps rights holders and organisers should take to protect themselves.

Why are anti-piracy measures needed in relation to sports broadcasting?

Live sports rights derive a large proportion of their value from a narrow ‘live window.’ This is what makes piracy uniquely harmful: an illegal stream available during the match competes directly with paid access at the point of peak demand. Rights holders also argue that persistent live piracy undermines long-term rights valuations.

This commercial pressure is a key driver behind ‘real-time’ enforcement models such as Italy’s ‘Piracy Shield’.

The situation between Cloudflare and AGCOM

AGCOM’s €14 million fine appears to reflect the regulator’s view that Cloudflare did not take the steps Italy’s Piracy Shield system requires to help disrupt illegal live streams.

The Piracy Shield is commonly described as a system introduced to enable rapid blocking of access to alleged pirate streams, particularly live sport, by implementing a fast pathway from rights holder notification to then actioning a block of access to the pirated or suspicious content.

A key controversy is that the speed and technical implementation can create transparency and proportionality concerns, including risks of over-blocking and limited opportunities to challenge mistakes in real time. In 2025, these issues particularly attracted scrutiny from the European Commission of the Piracy Shield in the context of the Digital Services Act and broader open-internet principles.

The wider legal point is that enforcement is increasingly moving beyond the operators of pirate sites and towards internet intermediaries, such as Cloudflare, and affecting services relied upon by many legitimate websites and users. For rights holders, this raises practical legal questions about who can be compelled to act, how quickly, and on what evidence, particularly where action is expected during a live event rather than through slower court processes.

Cloudflare’s position is that it supports the fight against piracy and is willing to cooperate with rights holders, but argues that AGCOM’s approach is disproportionate: the kind of blocking expected under Piracy Shield can be too broad – lawful websites and users may be affected even though they have no connection to piracy, increasing pushback from those affected and attracting closer attention from regulators.

Spain can be used to illustrate this ‘collateral damage’ risk in the context of LALIGA. In 2025, matchday anti-piracy action reportedly caused legitimate services to become unreachable at the same time as illegal streams were targeted, as blocks were applied in a way that affected shared online infrastructure.

It’s a matter of striking the right balance: rights holders argue that infrastructure providers, such as Cloudflare, should do more to prevent repeat abuse of their services by pirate operators and to respond quickly to credible infringement signals, whilst Cloudflare and others argue that they are not the host/publisher and that forcing them into broad blocking roles creates systemic risk and undermines the ordinary principle of an open-internet.

Our key takeaway for rights holders: Whilst it is important to strike the right balance, rights holders should continue to back strong anti-piracy measures to safeguard the long-term value of their rights.

Back to the Olympics: What could this have meant for Milano-Cortina?

Whilst Cloudflare’s public statements about withdrawing funding from Milano-Cortina raised concerns, it was not generally expected that Cloudflare would have been able to simply ‘walk away’. Given Cloudflare’s regulatory complaint was a separate issue, it would be unlikely that their agreement with Milano-Cortina would have allowed them to terminate on those grounds alone. For Cloudflare to have withdrawn, a clause to terminate at will would need to have been included in the agreement, which would have been unusual in that context as the Winter Olympics relied on Cloudflare for critical services and financial support. Nevertheless, it is a useful reminder that even for pro-bono service agreements, it is important to ensure robust protection.

As an aside, if Cloudflare had sought to withdraw support on the eve of the Winter Olympics, Milano-Cortina could potentially have explored claims relating to reputational harm and repudiatory breach, particularly given the heightened public security concerns associated with an event of that scale.

Although the issue did not progress further between the parties, it serves as a reminder of the importance of contingency planning for major events – even where services are provided by sponsors – as disputes can arise unexpectedly, even before events begin.

Our key takeaway for event organisers: Agreements should have built-in protections such as force majeure and carefully drafted termination/exit provisions, so that there are clear remedies and contingency arrangements for any unexpected disputes.

Conclusion

Piracy remains one of the most direct threats to the value of live rights – it pulls audiences away at the moment those rights matter most. Rights holders therefore need enforcement that works quickly and effectively, supports broadcast partners, and protects confidence in future rights cycles. It is unfortunate that Milano-Cortina was drawn into this dispute at all, but it is a timely reminder to tighten contracts around continuity and contingency.