Presumably italian courts could seize payments made by italian clients of cloudflare, yes? Even if the account is located well outside of italy, the owners can be compelled by legal means.
(To some degree of effectiveness, to be sure. But I have a hard time imagining there are no clients registered in italy at all.)
The payment is done, money is at Cloudflare in a US bank, Cloudflare takes it and move it somewhere else. How do they seize it? The money is gone and it's not coming back.
Assuming the client is an italian company, as would make sense in this thread, they would issue a court order compelling the corporation to comply with domestic law or get fined (or worse, idk, this is all speculative). Presumably the ask would be handing over control of the client's bank account for the needs of the court fulfilling its duties moving forward from the court order.
Edit: corrected mistake about whose account would be within the court's grasp.
It's more simple, imagine Cloudflare is used to show pedophile content, and refuses to remove it. Then the solution is to cut access to Cloudflare.
That's the logic here. It's not about whether they have offices or not, but whether they are distributing content to users in Italy.
There is always a local relay or ISP in Italy that offers access to Cloudflare, and this relay can be coerced into blocking Cloudflare.
Of course 1% of people may be able to access otherwise (for example, via Starlink or VPNs), but the objective is to block 90%+ of the traffic, so Cloudflare reconsiders following local laws.
The "refuses ro remove it" part is not even necessary. I run a large cloud storage site, and like all cloud storage it sees some abuse. I have set up a few processes to detect and remove child abuse content.
At some point the Police in Italy found some abusive content on my site. They did not inform me, they did not report the files. Instead they just blocked the whole site with a large pedophilia warning.
I have been trying to get in contact with the Italian police for months, but there is no working email address on any of the sites, and the people on the phone only speak Italian. It's a pretty hopeless situation.
(To some degree of effectiveness, to be sure. But I have a hard time imagining there are no clients registered in italy at all.)