Italian ISPs were forced to block a legal proxy-server website on Friday after the authorities found that proxyitalia.com could be used to access “BtJunkie”, “The Pirate Bay”, and other websites banned under Italy’s strict copyright enforcement regime.

Italy’s cybercrime police unit, the Guardia di Finanza (GdF), banned the general-purpose proxy service at the request of Cagliari deputy prosecutor Giangiacomo Pilia, in a move which provoked widespread condemnation in the Internet community:

This is another example of a knee-jerk reaction by technologically-ignorant politicians. Banning proxy servers will break more legitimate traffic than illegal traffic and will cause serious hindrance to industry and commerce. Real people’s jobs could be lost in the pursuit of appeasing the record companies. The illegal traffic will simply drop into an SSL-encrypted BiTorrent and then the politicians will be back to where they started from except that they have now managed to break a lot of their business communications.
— Simon Davies, UK Director, IDNet

Blocking access to proxy servers and VPNs is not an effective means of tackling copyright infringement online and will prevent access for legitimate uses of this technology such as mobile working and securing public wireless networks. — ISPA Spokesperson, speaking to ISPReview.co.uk

Proxy-servers allow users to connect to online services indirectly, requesting the service on behalf of the user and forwarding back the response. When a user connects to a website via a proxy, their ISP only sees the address of the proxy, not of the site the user is ultimately trying to access. This means that an Italian user can circumvent the local blocking regime by connecting via a proxy server in another country – unless, of course, the proxy-server is also subject to blocking.

However, most reasons for using a proxy have nothing to do with piracy or circumventing web-blocking. Businesses use them as gateways to their private networks, they can provide caches to speed up access, and ironically they are even often to implement content filters.

Furthermore, the arguments (such as they are) for banning proxy websites also apply to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and alternative DNS servers – technologies which are heavily used by businesses. For these reasons, it would be unwise for any government to follow Italy’s policy to its logical conclusions.