While researching an alleged Cloudflare blackmail of Canonical, I came across CEO Matthew Prince’s Twitter statements in January 2026 about an Italian fine over Piracy Shield non-compliance.
In a far-reaching decision, the Italian Communications Authority Agcom has fined infrastructure giant Cloudflare exactly 14,247,698.56 Euros
Notably, Prince responded with fascist propaganda aesthetics to frame himself in a battle with grotesque “dark” skinned Europeans.
Cloudflare’s legal department has now published a sanitized cleanup in Italian claiming an appeal, quietly disappearing every Vance reference, every Musk endorsement, every Olympics threat from January. They tried to refocus on Digital Services Act arguments that had been available to the company from the start, pretending as if the CEO hadn’t already made the bed they were lying in.
Cloudflare’s CEO spread overt fascist imagery. Two months later his legal team launched a compliance narrative like “new Trump phone, who this”?
I also ran through competitive analysis and it was clear that Google complied, OpenDNS quietly withdrew, and Akamai got blocked without theatrics. Only Cloudflare had a CEO who openly engaged in spreading fascist propaganda, taking time to “appreciate JD Vance”, weaponizing the dispute into a Trump-aligned political campaign against European regulatory sovereignty.
Go figure.
Perhaps that DDoS pressure on Canonical until they gave in to a Cloudflare contract is somehow related to CEO rants and ravings in January, 2026 if not earlier.
