I just want to point out that AGCOM once decided to put out an "Economically Relevant Instagram Influencers Register".

They're not really... let's say, 'on the ball' for understanding how the internet works. It's a bit of a running joke in Italy that their decisions are often anachronistic or completely misunderstanding of the actual technology behind the scenes.

And for the most part they just deliberate, they have no direct judicial authority. They ask an administrative judge to operate on their decisions, which brings us to some of the favourite sentences for any italian lawyer: the... "Ricorso al TAR". ("appeal to the Regional Administrative Court", which is a polite way to say "You messed up, badly and repeatedly, and now we have to spend an eternity trying to sort this out in a court room").

If we truly want to point out the ridiculousness of Italian tech regulations, the influencers' registry, the temporary ChatGPT ban from a few years back or even the new AI regulations cannot hold a candle to the 22-year-old war on... arcade games.

A poorly written regulation from 2003 basically lumped together all gaming machines in a public setting with gambling, resulting in extremely onerous source code and server auditing requirements for any arcade cabinet connected to the internet (the law even goes as far as to specify that the code shall be delivered on CD-ROMs and compile on specific outdated Windows versions) as well as other certification burdens for new offline games and conversions of existing machines. Every Italian arcade has remained more or less frozen in time ever since, with the occasional addition of games modded to state on the title screen that they are a completely different cabinet (such as the infamous "Dance Dance Revolution NAOMI Universal") in an attempt to get around the certification requirements.