The new “Omnibus” law in italy tries to block piracy by basically creating a situation in which you will face jail time if you get caught watching an illegal streaming (or your IP does) and ISP and IP providers (they name VPN and DNS services) will face jail time too if they don’t notify the authorities of “illegal activity” done by their users.

E.g. if I watch a soccer streaming from a pirate site, apparently, my VPN provider (in this case, Proton) will have to notify the authorities that I am watching that pirated content.

This is madness in so many ways, starting by the fact that the law implies that both my ISP and my VPN provider must spy my traffic to see if I am watching any illegal content.

I wanted to know if Proton has anything to say about all of this for their Italian customers. How are you guys going to face this? Will you simply stop providing the service? Will you ignore the law because you are not an italian company? Or will you spy our traffic to see if we are watching a soccer game?

I’m quite worried right now about the implications of this law to my privacy. Not because I pirate content but because the punishement for those who don’t notify the authorities means that to avoid legal problems, services like Proton will have to actually read our traffic.