Rome has decided that the best way to tackle dodgy football streams is to ask Google to deliberately break the internet.

The law in question is Italy’s dystopian-sounding Piracy Shield which functions more like a half-baked state-sponsored DDoS. It’s already forced Italian ISPs to kneecap websites faster than you can say “Napoli vs Juventus,” and now it's Google's turn in the crosshairs.

The goal is to prevent the nation’s couch potatoes from watching illegal Serie A streams without paying for a subscription.

This all kicked off because Google had the audacity not to leap into action within 30 minutes of AGCOM—Italy’s overcaffeinated communications regulator—barking orders. AGCOM claimed the sites were helping fans bypass the official paywalls, which is essentially a national pastime.

Google’s sin was providing a public DNS service that hadn’t yet been twisted into a blunt instrument for fighting piracy.

The Milan court, seemingly tired of Google’s polite indifference, ruled inaudita altera parte—legalese for “without requiring a response”—and demanded immediate DNS sabotage.

To call this policy “messy” would be generous. Last year, Italian ISPs accidentally torched access to the entire Google Drive domain because someone uploaded copyrighted material.

AGCOM’s top crusader, Commissioner Massimiliano Capitanio, leapt on LinkedIn to do a victory lap, gushing about how Italy now has “a system for the protection of copyright that is unique in the world.”

Capitanio complained that Google continues to ignore takedown orders, prompting the Italian judiciary to issue gag orders,

This farce follows a similar ruling against Cloudflare, which was threatened with fines of €10,000 per day unless it, too, joined the DNS censorship parade.

Italy now expects Google to follow suit, under threat of similar punishment—assuming it can even get the Californian behemoth to stop laughing long enough to respond.

There is no word from Google yet, but one can imagine their PR department is currently trying to translate “What the hell are they smoking?” into diplomatic Italian [Che diavolo si stanno fumando? Ed]