Let's be a bit more honest here, I think the Italian law is badly defined, but I also think the american perspective is wrong.
We (all tech people everywhere me included) argued for a lot of time for free speech on the internet, but the result currently is that we built a system that is free speech for Russian and Chinese bots and actors. In Europe we are under daily attack from Russian accounts that spread massive amounts of desinformation, deep fakes, just emotional appeals with the goal of destroying liberal democracy. The US government is actively trying to support them by fighting against any kind of European rules and spreading their part of desinformation.
This is not about normal politics, Europe is under siege.
We would go a long way if our communication platforms weren't intentionally amplifying the most controversial voices for the sake of maximizing ad revenue.
Back in the day the Russians needed to spend money to buy influence. Now they can just make their propaganda engaging enough and Western companies will happily host it and promote it for free.
I'm sure there's examples of non-US media companies pushing ragebait and similar. e.g. from the UK, there's BBC, Telegraph, Daily Mail, local news sites etc.
It's a perverse incentive that in chasing engagement, the ragebait is selected for.
If you tautologically define "best" as "that which wins", sure.
There's many ways for something to be better than another thing, though, and a lot of stuff is winning because it's best at "engagement" even if it's really bad in many other ways.
Yes (sort of), but the definition of best has changed so drastically built on completely different benchmarks (engagement)
As an example, watch a really good documentary on something, I would consider it best
But it might have less views than some AI slop video perhaps even generated in a minute
Another aspect relevant to the propaganda discussion is that I think modern algorithms have decided that ragebait is the best form of engagement and this is why propaganda might spread fast and how social media might actually actively help the foreign nation
I would argue that this is one of the reasons social media actively harms but its that profit over all for social media seems genuinely harmful. We need more focus on bluesky and mastodon and other alternatives as well to establish a network effect there but also that I would argue that prosecuting social media / large tech companies should have such a case where something can be prosecuted criminally for a class law suit case so that these social medias can stay better in shape than being deranged
But the issue to me feels like I am already protesting Italian even fining because in this case to me it feels like abusing the vagueness of the law and other factors so I am sure that if we give govts more power they might have the ability to abuse it as well for some lobbying powers (in this case it seems to be football)
Everything boils down to what the genuine incentives of the govts are I guess. I mean some are trying to do somethings but I guess all of this is just really tricky and the answer is in a series of changes and not a single one. There is nuance to this like every other discussion
This is the entire problem. This is possibly the single problem in the modern world. When social media first appeared, "feeds" were based on explicit subscription by the users and ordered chronologically. Later "likes" were added, but this was still based on deliberate user behavior and simple deterministic sorting while the ability to "repost" greatly expanded the reach of individual posts, later algorithms were introduced then the number of signals expanded beyond explicit user input to implicit engagement measures. Each step along this path has taken agency away from individuals.
I read articles and comments about people who were fired or suffered other consequences for something they said online, and the responses are righteous indignation--they ought to have known better than to post these things online! How did we get into this fucked up state of affairs? Social media started off as a way to talk to your friends, and over time your friends have been replaced with strangers, what they can say and who gets to say what controlled by centralized authorities, while individuals have been taught to self-censor.
It is not only the US companies or Russian bots, every government in the world is itching to get their thumb on the scale here to have a say in what the people are allowed to see, to hear, and to say.
That would be a political perspective. But what we are discussing now is some very rich football clubs who have a right to filter anything on the internet because they say so.
Free speech for the individuals is needed, in terms of people should not be punished for what they say. But social media platforms owned by foreign countries is a danger for any democracy. There's a reason the US wants to capture Tiktok, Iran is shutting down the internet, and China has The Great Firewall.
Since the US is turning away from Europe's interests, it's just logical that American platforms will be restricted in one way or another. I don't see any way around it.
There is a big difference between danger for democracy because of these addiction farming Social media platforms with propaganda and something like piracy as well though.
No you can't, all of this stuff is designed to influence you without you knowing it, or you would not be influenced. This is like thinking advertisements have no effect on you.
People pay good money because they know it is effective, it is influencing you, you cannot decide for yourself.
So who gets to decide? Someone who is above influence? Who is that?
There has to be a lot more nuance. I clearly see that both Putin and the CCP do a lot of things predicated on the exact claim that their respective populations can not be left to decide for themselves. "People left free would make bad decisions, we the rulers are morally obligated to force them into a good path". I think this is the ostensible meaning of "freedom is slavery".
There has to be nuance yes. But the nuanced position starts with accepting the reality that a ton of people are indeed having their brain turned to goo. Just go outside of the bubble of somewhat tech literate highly educated young people and look at what 60+ year olds consume on Facebook.
There's AI generated content with tens of millions of views that is as fake as ancient aliens on the history channel but nobody seems to realize it. If you comment here there is a high chance you did not grow up among people with 8 years of basic education who haven't read a book in 20 years and believe quite literally everything they see. That is what a decent chunk of any population is like. The biggest blind spot of well-educated internet libertarians who taught themselves how to code at 15 is that they in all likelihood have no concept of how the average citizen navigates the world.
The problem with Putin isn't that he thinks a country needs intelligent and wise leaders, Plato would have told you the same thing. It's where he's steering it that's the issue and that the country's leadership is no more capable at the top than it is at the bottom.
I don't know if any of the links below will count as crying; but here are some, from the British media reporting on Russia:
- BBC, 2018: Russia: Google removes Putin critic's ads from YouTube https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45471519
- BBC, 2021: How Russia tries to censor Western social media https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-59687496
- BBC, 2021: Russia slows down Twitter over 'banned content' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56344304
- BBC, 2021: Russia threatens YouTube ban for deleting RT channels https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58737433
- BBC, 2021: Russia threatens to slow down Google over banned content https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57241779
- Reuters, 2022: Russia blocks access to BBC and Voice of America websites https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/russia-restricts-access-bbc-russian-service-radio-liberty-ria-2022-03-04/
- The Guardian, 2022: Russia blocks access to Facebook and Twitter https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/04/russia-completely-blocks-access-to-facebook-and-twitter
- BBC, 2022: Russia restricts social media access https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-60533083
- BBC, 2022: Russia confirms Meta's designation as extremist https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-63218095
- BBC, 2024: Data shows YouTube 'practically blocked' in Russia - https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/b0003111
- BBC, 2024: Russia's 2024 digital crackdown reshapes social media landscape - https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/b0003arza
"The EU condemns the totally unfounded decision by the Russian authorities to block access to over eighty European media in Russia.
This decision further restricts access to free and independent information and expands the already severe media censorship in Russia. The banned European media work according to journalistic principles and standards. They give factual information, also to Russian audiences, including on Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine.
In contrast, the Russian disinformation and propaganda outlets, against which the EU has introduced restrictive measures, do not represent a free and independent media. Their broadcasting activities in the EU have been suspended because these outlets are under the control of the Russian authorities and they are instrumental in supporting the war of aggression against Ukraine.
Respect for the freedom of expression and media is a core value for the EU. It will continue supporting availability of factual information also to audiences in Russia."[0]
> I don't want my politicians deciding what is good or bad on the internet. I'm an adult, and I can decide for myself.
The issue isn't whether politicians are deciding what's good or bad.
The issue is that, in Europe, foreign actors with explicit ill intent are deciding a ton of the content your neighbours are watching/reading, day in day out, on the internet. AI has made this easier and even more scalable than before. This content is being used to influence or outright decide elections. Elections of more politicians that are "deciding what's good or bad", eh. Such as politicians deciding that Russia is good.
What the actual fuck do we do to defend ourselves, pray tell? The whole "let them have critical thinking" doesn't work, we are under active war and citizens who don't know better are specifically targeted. And besides, we are not gonna take lessons from the country that yelled high and mighty for years they're the land of the free, and let itself fall into complete autocracy & dictatorship. In the US, those same citizens are the useful tools repeating state propaganda, two steps removed from "Just Following Orders".
And full context: I agree with Matt and support Cloudflare's stance here. But people can quit it with cheap retorts like "Freedom of speech for me, not for thee". It's not that simple.
into complete autocracy & dictatorship....ummm you mean a democratically elected president & government? Plus these hyperboles don't really resonate anymore as they've been used for every little thing people don't like.
It's still a democracy even if you don't like the outcome.
Because freedom of speech was always a misguided creed at best.
The speech of the manipulator is not the same as the speech of the expert and they shouldn't be given the same treatment, lest you want psychological warfare waged on your nation.
American free speech extremists like these tech CEOs are either willing patsies or useful idiots in the hybrid warfare against Europe.
What rules can you possibly have that distinguish the expert and the manipulator in all cases, without abuse?
I think free speech comes from the same base as universal vote: any selection mechanism would be corrupted and in the end cause more harm than good. That is why the solution is to let everyone speak / vote. If you have some uncorruptible people or mechanism for selection, just use that to make policy decisions directly.
I think the solution is to elevate critical thinking in the populations, so people can be less vulnerable to psychological warfare. Otherwise you're just picking a different manipulator - whoever writes or enforces the speech limits.
I think the solution is to elect a commission of experts to be deciding this. Term limits. Separate independent institution from the government - no meddling.
Critical thinking even in those capable of it is a limited resource. I can't spend all day every day critically examining every single statement the internet flings at me - it's mentally exhausting and wears one down.
Elect by the people at large? People who voted for Trump and such? What's the point in an elected institution separated from the government - the government is already elected, and people will mostly vote for candidates from the same parties in all elections.
Besides, "elect a comission of experts" is a contradiction. Experts are not elected. Expertise is not determined by voting. You want to appoint or select a comission of experts, or elect a comission of politicians. These are the choices. Appointment or selection will be done by someone else, likely politicians too.
You just hope some incorruptible competent people will get there by magic. They will not.
If you could do this, just elect a comission of experts to run the country, instead of this "truth comission" that makes sure people are well informed to vote correctly in elections for the real government, which will in turn run the country. Why do the indirection? There is no reason, if you could "elect" good people, but you can't.
> The speech of the manipulator is not the same as the speech of the expert
I don't think that's contentious. The point of free speech is not that all speech is equally valuable or positive. It's that I don't trust you to decide which speech shouldn't be allowed, because that power will 100% be abused, until it's just as pernicious as the "manipulators" it's claiming to defend against.
These tech CEOs just want to have to spend as little as possible to maintain their platforms. They don't actually care about freedom of speech beyond that.
The whole concept of democracy is based on this: you elect politicians, they decide. If you don't like that, you don't like democracy. Which is fine, but then you don't get to defend it either as the best system under the sun, etc.
A lot of people naively interject "But we're not a democracy, we're a Republic!" at arguments where it has no real bearing, but _here_ it does.
We (America) are not a democracy, we're a constitutionally limited republic. Republic is a subset of democracy, but the 'constitutionally limited republic' part is important. We cannot elect politicians to censor the things that we want censored because our republic has not authorized the government to do censorship, and the bill of rights expressly forbids it. They are constitutionally limited from doing so until and unless the constitution is amended.
Until and unless we change the constitution, any efforts to do that are illicit. Popular democracy would allow a majority to vote to bring back slavery, and if you don't like that, you don't like democracy.
This kind of "epistemic collapse" via propaganda is an established method of subverting nation states, Russia has been doing it for decades.
Democracy relies on having a reasobaly well informed population. The problem today is that it takes ten times more effort to refute bullshit than to spread it. Information hygiene is becoming a very big problem in this anything-goes social media environment.
Traditional mass media had journalistic norms and standards, nowadays anyone can claim anything with no quality control.
It's the same age old story: there simply is no substitute for good governance, Italy doesn't have it and hasn't had it for decades, and "freedom of speech absolutists" wouldn't know what it looks like in the first place.
I am not on any social media so I don't even know what the propaganda is that you are talking about but there are ways to really filter out youtube in such a way (by following unbiased media houses) and I haven't seen much propaganda on youtube (I think)
> This is not about normal politics, Europe is under siege.
I am not European but this seems such an dangerous precedent to set upon. You mention destroying liberal democracy but also the fact that Europe is under siege makes people think of providing war time resolutions to Countries even for small details (and Mind you this ban itself has nothing to do with russia that much, its just the amount of influence football has in italy)
To me it feels as if by saying Europe's under siege, it gives more war time resolutions or justificiations for unmoral behaviour. In fact that's what happened right now. This also actively undermines democracy and one can clearly see how.
I understand your comment's in good faith and I appreciate it but I am just not even sure how this move of fining Cloudflare for not being in line for their censorship is related to this other instance.
I think this is moving the goal post. Cloudflare isn't challenging the need to restrict access to some websites, it is challenging who has the right to decide. Quoting the tweet:
> We believe Italy, like all countries, has a right to regulate the content on networks inside its borders. But they must do so following the Rule of Law and principles of Due Process.
I live in Italy, I'm a citizen. I don't feel any safer having the internet regulated by a bunch of bureaucrats than I do state actors and bots.
Bureaucrats are a problem, but they're eventually accountable to the people. Companies are accountable to shareholders located in another country, who don't give a damn about whatever so long as the money keeps coming. I choose bureaucrats against businessmen anytime.
The west have had various forms for this since before the internet,
and certainly have huge efforts similar to what you list above,
but have in general been far more productive than bots from
the other side.
How is Cloudflare refusing to comply with DNS censorship even remotely related to propaganda campaigns conducted by the geopolitical opponent of your personal choosing?
Not only does it seem like you've gone off topic to push a personal agenda, you're presenting a false dichotomy. We could (if we wanted to) wall our networks off along national boundaries while still preserving freedom of speech within our enclave. I don't think that would be a good idea nor do I think the execution of such an initiative would be likely to go smoothly but the example serves to illustrate that there's a huge potential solution space.
Personally what I don't understand is why Cloudflare didn't stop offering access to 1.1.1.1 from Italian addresses. At the end of the day picking a direct fight with the government of a jurisdiction you operate in seems extremely unwise. I fail to see the upside for them here.
Actually assuming they don't intentionally operate 1.1.1.1 from within Italy how is it CF's problem if Italians access it? Shouldn't this be on the Italian telecoms to filter traffic to this dastardly "illegal" foreign resolver?
I think the upside is drawing a line in the sand now before they tighten requests any further and (maybe) not losing the revenue from some genuinely illegal pirating services that use them.
Russian bots and subversive propaganda in general take hold when the quality and diversity of the media decreases, which leads citizens to listen to alternative narratives.
The tipping point happened during covid - the authorities were so synced up with the media, and the online censorship became so prevalent that the official narrative felt deeply off, coordinated, and often contradictory. There was no debate in the EU, we had to lock down all of the countries, with no alternative (for instance, protect old people but let younger ones live their lives) possible.
Given how Orwellian and borderline crazy average media discourse had become, especially after the vaccine was out, I saw many people start looking elsewhere. My mother was one of them. She had consumed mostly state media her whole life. As she realized how stupid the narrative had become (state media was discussing if it was ok to sell socks in shops, or if doctors should examine unvaccinated customers), she and others like her turned to online media promoting fringe and radical theories.
Now, the European bureaucrats, having not learnt their lesson, want to double down and further restrict freedom of speech. The problem is that as long as the local media just repeats the official party line, which often strays away from reality, russian content farms will get new eyeballs.
The problem with this argument, and why free speech absolutism is the only stance that makes sense, is that someone always has a good reason why you need to throw the bathwater out right now, baby be dammed.
How do you know the end result is worse than disinformation? If the Russian disinformation allow Russia to destroy the freedom and democracy in Europe, and allow Russia to take over, that seems to me to much worse than limiting the publication of lies and slander.
Freedom is a scale, not binary. I'm willing to move a bit on that scale to avoid going completely to one of the opposites. I completely disagree with your suggestion that if you don't have complete freedom, you're at the complete opposite end, I.e. zero freedom.
Something doesn't need to be slander to be information warfare. We need something much larger scale and more powerful to fight back the hybrid warfare from Russia and increasingly also the US.
Is it possible that that belief is itself influenced by the propaganda you’re worried about? If I were Russia I’d do my best to create a rift between the US and Europe.
I see lots of disagreements here, but I must say I also soured on free speech. I used to think that free speech was necessary and overall a positive for society. Then I saw the Capitol attack in US. The disinformation spread in England about kids stabbed that led to riots. I see disinformation every day, especially from USA, saying Europe has no freedom, that it's overrun with criminals, and people not only believe it, but vote accordingly. This has to stop. Humans weren't trained to use rationality and reasoning every second of their life. Reason costs a lot of cognitive power so the brain implements a hundred shortcuts. For example: if you see something appear frequently, you assume it to be true. This is good for avoiding poisonous plants, but it's terrible when you go in Twitter and you're spammed with the same lies day and night. It's messing with us. Enough is enough. Free speech with guardrails.
You should be able to insult and criticise the Prime Minister.
You should not be able to gain a position of power and then go on a crowded stage to claim that vaccines cause autism. This is intolerable. We are attacking the foundations of society. People are not rational actors. Not you, and not me. We are very simple animals.
I agree that people clearly don't use critical thinking 100% of the time and are easily influenced.
But you're basically arguing for not criticizing the status quo.
Many social improvements have been attained by "attacking the foundations of society". How would you like living under some absolute monarchy? How do you think gay people would like to live in a church-run society like 500 years ago?
"But you're basically arguing for not criticizing the status quo.", but that wasn't what was argued ("You should be able to insult and criticise the Prime Minister."), but more your interpretation of what was said. You're making a strawman argument.
Well, the PM isn't exactly the status quo, I wasn't replying to that. Rather, I was responding to this specific bit, emphasis mine:
> You should not be able to gain a position of power and then go on a crowded stage to claim that vaccines cause autism. This is intolerable. We are attacking the foundations of society.
Not sure when the strawman is. "The foundations of society", for me, means "the way things are". Which can be vaccines, sure, or any kind of general policy which has been showed to have a positive effect on society, but it can also be all kinds of things taken for granted which aren't necessarily rooted in reason.
To be really honest, I share a similar stance to you overall but I would still admit that there is some partial truth to it
I would like to expand this not only to foreign state actors that people mention but also companies inside which are actively trying to do nefarious stuff
As an example, Tobacco industry knew that the damages were there but they still tried to spur up medical confusion around it all so that people would still think that medical discussion is going on when it was 100% clear that tobacco harms. Who knows how many people died
The man who discovered that washing hands saved lives was so ridiculed and I think met with hostility because doctors couldn't comprehend the idea that it was they would could spread diseases. This is decades before germ theory was invented
His name is Ignaz Semmelweis and the world was unjust to him. Doctors ridiculed and threatend him and he was labelled obsessive and doctors called it mere coincidence. His career crumbled as he was forced out of vienna/his hospital and his mental health deteriorated as his warnings were ignored
in 1865 Semmelwise was commited to an asylum where he died just two weeks later at age 47
Only after pasteur developed germ theory and lester pioneered antisceptic surgery, semmelwise was finally vindicated.
This simple practise of handwashing is now considered the most basic medical standard worldwide saving countless millions of lives in the process.
(I had to write it by hand here basically transcribing this really amazing video that I watched about such a topic, I would highly suggest watching it)
Yeah, I want to be more supportive of free speech, but I don’t think anyone is doing a great job of representing how to do it in the social media age. FIRE does a terrible job of it with mostly platitudes with no nuance.
But one maybe counterintuitive reason I don’t like free speech absolutism in the social media era — one of the platitude’s of FIRE is like, “the answer to hate speech is more speech” and “I want to know who the racist are so I can avoid them.”
1. The answer to nothin in this firehouse of speech in modern society is “more speech”.
2. Part of the peace we used to have in society is I didn’t have to know about everyone’s political opinions. Loosely speaking maybe I thought small-town folk were close minded, but there weren’t tens of thousands of examples of it across feeds on the internet all day.
To be honest, I think this argument is FUD as well. There are some Russian accounts and there is disinformation, but this isn't the core of polarization in western democracies and Europe in particualr. And reigning in free speech is even poison in this situation, which is more complex than pointing your finger at bots.
In Europe freedom of speech is under threat from its own population, which is more and more driven by fear. This fear might not be unreasonable and has multiple sources, but it remains a bad basis for decision or policy making.
WTF? How are you attacked by russian accounts? This childish notion of thinking that only "true" thoughts are allowed under free speech, and the rest must be eradicated needs to die.
If you don't like the risk of russian accounts, don't follow them, and follow accounts that you like. It's as easy as that.
You have news, government news sites, journalists, newspapers, it's never been easier to find sources to trust and compare them against each other.
Screaming murder because Sergei6778 says that Ukraine is evil is just stupid. Take responsibility for your own reading and mind, and stop using the law as a hamfisted tool to stop free speech. Take the bad with the good, or else there won't be any good left in the future.
While I agree with your sentiment, it's more and more clear to me that reality doesn't reflect it. Many people are extremely easily influenced by easy to digest soundbites.
I'm often baffled by the level of superficial and binary thinking even in "intellectuals" (as in people who hold degrees and you'd expect to have at least a modicum of critical thinking). More often than not it seems based on emotions.
Now have these people spend most of their waking hours doomscrolling some echo chamber on tiktok, and I can see why some may be worried about the influence of some "bad actor".
Given this, and the highly polarized political scene (and I'm in Europe!), I have to say I'm quite worried as to how things will unfold. Hell, there's no need for Sergei and his friends! Just the local politicians' popularity contest is enough.
We don't have freedom of speech for its own sake because of some inherent good. We have it because it's a useful tool to get other peoples perspectives and allows us come to more realistic conclusions where most feel included. People paid by the chinese or russian government are in complete opposition to that spirit.
Not just Russia and China. Musk does Nazi salutes and Grok promotes pedophilia. Trump invades countries and talks about taking over Greenland, which is part of Europe. The US are no less of a threat than Russia.
Contrary to widespread belief, Europe has the means to fight those threats. It just chooses not to, for reasons I don't understand.
Look at germany for example (where I'm from). Shutting down nuclear power plants and coal at the same time.
More than 50% of people here still tell you this is necessary to save the planet - even though what we save is so little globally, that it does nothing relevant to stop global warming.
so what? let politicians “protect” us? it already went too far. a lot of liberal democratic states are going towards electronic dictatorship, when you are under total control and allowed to do only what is permitted by somebody’s made-up rules. all those e-IDs tightly coupled with your biometric identity are no more than developing a simple idea — a simple idea that some people want to control other people.
so, no, thanks. i don’t want this, at least for those countries that are still more or less free from it. i already live in one where we have to fight this dictate every day: opening a browser, writing a post, doing whatever we want, but not the way guys who captured power want it.
this perspective — “just let them protect us” — comes from a democratic habit. when you’re used to living this way, you can trust elected people.
It isn't even obvious to me which country GP refers to when they write "i already live in one". No reasonable individual would criticize "liberal politicians" and "electronic dictatorship" without making it absolutely clear where they are coming from. This obfuscation seems like a deliberate choice and makes any standing point balancing on crutches.
Maybe the first two octets but HN does not block proxies, VPS nodes, servers, etc... The site would have to block such things for new accounts and store the IP used to create the account for that information to be useful assuming residential shady VPN's were not used. I doubt that level of change would occur here given the topic of dark mode comes up often.
That isn't a Russian. It is me, an American. It is convenient for you to dismiss my arguments as Russian so that you can ignore their validity. The same thing happens in the US: people dismiss arguments by saying they are right wing (i.e., from Republicans)
Interesting how now the list has expanded to include Chinese "bots" and "actors". Calling anyone who disagrees with your political beliefs a foreigner is an old and extremely paranoid, nasty rhetorical trick. Very similar to the people who call everything they dislike racism.
The polls don't lie and they show that there are hundreds of millions of people all over the west who just flatly disagree with your whole ideology. The unity you imagine would exist if not for shadow accounts doesn't exist, and it's delusional to believe it does.
No no. Just accept that you're a totalitarian dictator at heart, embrace the warmth of just being evil publicly, without pretense or obfuscation. "Silence the opposition!" you cry.
Freedom of speech is binary, there aren't any acceptable degrees of it: either you have it, or you don't.
If there is disinformation, the solution is to counter it with actual information, to give the people better tools to identify it (like X's community notes), and to educate the general population so they will have better critical thinking.
Restricting freedom of speech is never a solution. How long until dissenting opinions are censored because somebody labels them "disinformation"? Who watches the watchmen? etc.
I'd rather live in a society with full freedom of speech and disinformation from State actors than have only 100% accurately vetted news.
> Freedom of speech is binary, there aren't any acceptable degrees of it: either you have it, or you don't.
That seems to be the American definition.
We don’t all have binary systems for our views and politics, and some of our democracies are doing better than than US despite our apparent lack of free speech.
It’s not even the American definition. We have many exceptions, particularly using speech to cause violence or physical harm in various ways. I’m also confused by American free speech absolutists because that’s not a thing here and essentially never has been.
Of course this is all hypothetical at the moment, as the current administration doesn’t seem to care much for the law.
Community notes typically kicks in after the tweet has already gone insanely viral. It’s not useless, but I wonder about its effectiveness.
I see your point about free speech but I think it has to be more nuanced. For example, where has continuing stupid anti vaxer debate left the Americans?
>> If there is disinformation, the solution is to counter it with actual information
So what you argue is that we should build good bots to counter the bad bots right? and all this in a "secret" to avoid suspension by the tech companies. This looks like playing stupid games.
The disinformation in this era can basically shadow any kind of legitimate "counter-disinformation".
To make the game fair we would first need lockdown the internet content on citizen ID authorization so that we can identify if the free speach spread is actually published by a real person or some chinese bot pretending to be a single European mom with 3 kids.
This is not something anyone wants so I think the current trade off of court orders to take down content is legitimate and the best approach.
Cloudflare, the tech companies and US government likes the absolute free speech like everything else (i.e. free market) as long as it serves their interests. I wouldn't be surprised to see Cloudflare proudly repelling some "chinese propaganda attacks" and frame it like a cyber security win instead of anti-free speech action.
> In Europe we are under daily attack from Russian accounts that spread massive amounts of desinformation, deep fakes, just emotional appeals with the goal of destroying liberal democracy.
The disinformation campaigns have always been there, the reason they're growing roots in the mind of the average European is because the EU is spending it's razor thon political capital on things Chat Control, Digital Omnibus which are wildly unpopular.
Isn't it a bit ironic that in order to protect "liberal democracy" you need to reach out for authoritarian suppression?
Yes we need to restrict the freedom of non citizens to influence our debates. And we need to have rules how digital platforms can influence our internal debates, we had this rules for TV and newspapers. That's not suppression thats's defense.
How do you restrict the freedom of non-citizens without restricting the freedom of citizens too?
My parents and grandparents didn't fight against the Romanian authoritarian regime for reading of confidential communications to come back under a EU banner instead.
The EU is more of a threat to itself than Russia is, the only reason the "Russian propaganda" has teeth is because the current bureaucrat class in the EU Council have outlived their Mandate of Heaven
Let's assume I want every citizen to navigate the web freely while fighting propaganda machines as much as possible, so that means I want an automated system that creates the set difference between these two in real-time, as reliable as possible. To create such a system, and since there shouldn't be any overlap in these two sets, I can effectively put my efforts in half if I put my work in the detection of one such set.
The scaling problem, as I see it here, arises from the following: While the set of individual citizens (kind of) has an upper limit, represented by the number of internet users worldwide, the botnet nodes in propaganda machines do not. I can limit the set further, for example if I want to focus on the citizens that are part of my government only, whereas propaganda machines can come from anywhere on the globe. Internet users already need to provide a proof on authentication for quite a lot of services, while botnets generally want to avoid being identified as such.
While I'm far from in favor of Chat Control, I can somewhat understand why these initiatives are in motion at all.
> The EU is more of a threat to itself than Russia is
To put it mildly, this conclusion is non-sequitur at best.
"The EU is more of a threat to itself than Russia is"; it can be easily argued that this is only the case if democracy has little value because in Russia democracy does indeed have little value (let alone life, etc).
"Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
So the EU and the EC are big lumbering organisation that make poor decisions; but then people make poor decisions day in day out. But just because you *feel* disaffected doesn't mean the system is inherently wrong (unless of course you believe that politics' primary, if not only, purpose is to make you "feel good(tm)").
It's probably far more accurate to say that wealth inequality is the EU's biggest threat and that "the elites" (which is more than just senior politicians and bureaucrats) don't feel the pain of inequality and so aren't internally motivated to do much about it (culture eats strategy for breakfast, etc etc).
The average person in Europe does neither care about chat control, nor have they heared more about tgan one or two surface-level news articles. Russian propaganda being more and more effective and these actions are not related.
Russian propaganda is effective because the EU leadership has dropped the ball so hard that the Kremlin looks attractive. People aren't as stupid as you think
```
The rights holders also declared, under their own responsibility, providing
certified documentary evidence of the current nature of the unlawful conduct, that the reported
domain names and IP addresses were unequivocally intended to infringe the
copyright and related rights of the audiovisual works relating to live broadcast sporting events
and similar events covered by the reports.
```
So, I'm not sure anybody verified that what the right holders claimed was actually true. While I understand what AGCOM (the italian FCC, more-or-less) is trying to do, it seems that, as usual, a law was created without verifying how the implementation of such law would work in practice (something very common in Italy), and this is the result.
Cloudflare CEO seems irate, and some of his references are not great, but I'd be inclined at thinking he's got at least _some_ reason on his side.
Also another Italian here. For context, the "Piracy Shield" mentioned in the order is basically a legislative hacksaw authorized by the regulator (AGCOM) primarily to protect Serie A football rights. Soccer rules Italy more than the Vatican..
It’s a mess technically: it mandates ISPs and DNS providers to block IPs/domains within 30 minutes of a report, with zero judicial oversight. It’s infamous locally for false positives—it has previously taken down Google Drive nodes and random legitimate CDNs just because they shared an IP with a pirate stream.
The NUCLEAR threat regarding the 2026 Winter Olympics (Milano-Cortina) is the real leverage here. He’s bypassing the regulator and putting a gun to the government’s head regarding national prestige and infrastructure security.
My personal take idea likely outcome: Cloudflare wins.
EU Law: The order almost certainly violates the Digital Services Act (DSA) regarding general monitoring obligations and country-of-origin principles.
Realpolitik: The Italian government can't risk the Olympics infrastructure getting DDoS'd into oblivion because AGCOM picked a fight they can't win. They will likely settle for a standard, court-ordered geo-block down the road, but the idea of Cloudflare integrating with a broken 30-minute takedown API is dead on arrival.
> The NUCLEAR threat regarding the 2026 Winter Olympics (Milano-Cortina) is the real leverage here. He’s bypassing the regulator and putting a gun to the government’s head regarding national prestige and infrastructure security.
Kind of wild that a private company has that kind of power, both in terms of being one of the few that can offer this service and they can make threats at this level.
I have to say I'm curious over whether that's actually leverage or a massively miscalculated threat that is just going to push the Italian population and politicians firmly against cloudflare.
I'm pretty sure if you tried that here (Canada) it would do the latter.
Would a regulating body in Canada do this, though? And if so, hopefully Cloudflare would say fuck you just the same as they did Italy. It's nice to see someone actually taking a principled stand for once.
If our politicians were stupid enough to pass a law telling them to - I sure hope so - we live in a place with the rule of law not the rule of whatever Joe at the CRTC thinks should happen. Regulators exist to enforce the will of parliament...
Would our politicians pass a law this unfortunate... I hope not... but I don't really have that much faith in them. The current government probably wouldn't, but governments change.
Referencing the Trump administration - the people going around threatening, deporting, arresting, taking money from, etc people as a consequence for speech they don't like - as the standard for free speech makes this far from a principled stand by cloudflare. They took their moral high ground and sunk it. This isn't about speech for them, just money.
You're free to believe all that. "Rule of Law" loses all meaning when corruption takes root. We don't like that "for my friends, everything, for everyone else, the law" shit.
Things can be morally wrong and still legal, and the law itself can intentionally enforce immorality. It's your civic duty to determine when upholding the law degrades you and every else more than following it does.
Also I feel like threatening to take your toys and go home when they don't play fair is a totally valid response.
"for my friends, everything, for everyone else, the law" is a weird description, when that's not the problem with this law at all. There's no question of selective enforcement going on here. The problem is lack of due process, not that.
It's a great description of one of the main tactics the administration he is asking for help uses though. Which again goes to Cloudflare entirely abandoning the moral high ground here.
Threatening to leave is "totally valid" in that it's their right to leave, but it's also not something that a sovereign country that cares about staying sovereign should give any respect to. The only response to a foreign corporation saying that that maintains your independence is "you can't quit, you're fired." Otherwise you just become beholden to the corporation providing you "charity".
> It's your civic duty to determine when upholding the law degrades you and every else more than following it does.
That’s a lot more complicated. What happens if a foreign power takes over Canada and changes the law? What is the state law goes against the laws stated by your religion?
If a foreign power takes over your country and changes the laws in ways that conflict with the previous constitution, there’s a break in sovereignty continuity so your options are: 1. Pledge to the new authority and move on
2. Keep your word on your previous pledge and resist
I have to doubt that it would push the populace against the company when the company is actually both providing good (free protection, DDOS mitigation, CyberSec) and supporting appropriate judicial process to make decisions.
Political threats of withdrawing from an event in an explicit attempt to pressure the country is the opposite of supporting appropriate judicial process.
No one is entitled to free shit, but anyone who says "I'll stop giving you free shit unless you do X" is not giving you free shit, they're engaging in barter. And bartering to try to change a law, just like paying to change a law, is obvious and illegal corruption.
Pretty sure, speaking as a Canadian, that the Canadian government would not be able to implement that kind of legislation. And that if they did, I would 100% back Cloudflare.
The services aren't pro bono if they're only offered in exchange for getting a law modified.
And if you offer people free stuff and then turn around and demand something in return, they're going to get upset and like you less than if you had never offered the free stuff in the first place.
There was no exchange implied... before this sentence. Cloudflare might well be justified in feeling that the other side altered the deal, so to speak.
This is one of the consequences of outsourcing this (and other capabilities) to the private sector.
Many governments simply don’t have the skill and political will to invest in these kinds of capabilities, which puts them at the mercy of private actors that do. Not saying this is good or bad, just trying to describe it as I see it.
Governments just can't come to grips with how much money software engineers make.
Paying a contractor $x million? Yeah no problem, projects are projects, they cost what they cost. Does that $x million pay for 5x fewer people than it would in construction or road repair? We don't know, we don't care, this is the best bid we got for the requirements, and in line with what similar IT projects cost us before.
Paying a junior employee $100k? "We can't do that, the agency director has worked here for 40 years, and he doesn't make that much."
Variants of this story exist in practically every single country. You can make it work with lower salaries through patriotism, but software engineers in general are one of the less patriotic professions out there, so this isn't too easy to do.
> Paying a junior employee $100k? "We can't do that, the agency director has worked here for 40 years, and he doesn't make that much."
I can assure you that junior software engineers in Italy or anywhere else in the EU make nowhere near that amount of money. In fact, few of even the most senior software engineers make that amount of money anywhere in the EU (in Switzerland or the UK they might see such salaries, at the higher tiers).
The figures I gave were in-line with the US (as that's what most of this audience understands), but if you scale everything by a certain factor, the entire principle holds basically anywhere.
Not really. US programming salaries are much higher than most other engineering and specialist positions, which makes it harder for the government to hire good programmers.
However, programming salaries here in the EU are much more in line with other specialist salaries, which the government already hires many of. So there is no significant problem in hiring programmers at competitive rates for government work. The bigger problem, and the reason this doesn't usually happen, is just ideological opposition to state services, preferring to contract out this type of work instead of building IT infrastructure in-house.
And they get exactly what they pay for. There's zero reason for a competent professional to stick around with that kind of pay any longer than strictly necessary (aka until their own gig or freelancing takes off).
Not just governments, that same kind of greed exists in private companies too.
The only way to make good money while being an employee is to have your buddy spin up a "vendor" offering overpriced bullshit and shill it within your company. In exchange, you also spin up a "vendor" and your buddy shills it at his company.
This might explain why there are sooooooooo many vps providers/cloud providers, this might be one valid reason as to why.
I am sure that this might not be the only reason but still, its a valid reason for many. Do you know of companies/people which do this and how widespread this practise is?
To me it still feels like malicious compliance tho for what its worth.
I said this in jest as a reaction to what post-tax SWE salaries in Europe top out at, all while the same companies have no problem burning insane money on vendors. There is zero incentive to do good work as an employee as it won't be compensated anywhere near what even a shoddy vendor gets paid.
But given the rise of many SaaSes selling exactly the same thing every full-stack web framework used to provide for free - think Auth0, Okta, etc, it may very well be happening.
> Kind of wild that a private company has that kind of power
Also kind of wild that it’s a private US company pushing their current political views on another sovereign state. Cloudflare as a political tool of leverage is a level of dystopia we really should try not to unlock.
They're threatening to take their ball and go home. If they move all of their operations out of Italy, under what principle does Italy demand they block content globally? Should Wikipedia remove their page on Tiananmen Square because the Chinese government demands it (which they would, if they thought it would work)?
I think the parent is trying to say that whatever issues Italy may have internally, it's not up to Cloudflare to comment or enact solutions on their own.
a private US company pushing their current political views on another sovereign state
This has always been the case in the western world, even before America itself existed. Some use the US govt (CIA) as leverage but often will just do it themselves.
A system like this could actually work as long as every takedown request involves posting a significant bond into a holding account and where the publisher can challenge the block and claim the bond if the block is ruled illegal.
This achieves the advantages of quick blocking while deterring bad behavior, and provides cost-effective recourse for publishers that get blocked, since the bond would cover the legal fees of challenging the block (lawyers can take those cases on contingency and get paid on recovery of the bond).
This is one of the very few non-money-laundering use cases for crypto.
I would support a “5 cents per unsolicited email” email system, in a similar way. If you make it a mildly enjoyable $5/hour task to read the first sentence or two of your spam folder, the overall internet would be better.
BunnyCDN don't run their own network, most of their servers are hosted at DataPacket(.com), but they use some other hosting companies too.
DataPacket has a very large network though and is kind of, sort of EU-based. AFAIK most operations are in Czechia, but the company is registered in UK. And there's also the Luxembourg-based Gcore.
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.
I guess they were inspired by a very similar law in Greece from 2002[0] where in an attempt to outlaw illegal gambling done in arcades a poorly written law outlawed all games (the article mentions it was in was in public places but IIRC the law was for both public and private and the government pinky promised that they'll only act on public places). I remember reading that some internet cafes were raided by the police too :-P.
Not the OP, but I tried it when it came out. VR headset technology wasn't good enough for screens within screens and it was nauseating more than anything.
There's also impedance mismatch between using the headset controllers and the physical ones in the game. Ideally, I should be able to use my own fightstick in an augmented reality configuration.
The quest 3 is good enough and the Galaxy XR is incredibly high resolution. But it isn't a really ideal way to play arcade ROMs for long term but just to enjoy the nostalgia.
I got it for $75 a month for two years. Visual clarity is incredible and monitor replacement level but comfort is meh so I bought studioform creative head strap which helped a lot. You can use Virtual Desktop to connect to any computer easily.
I'm a sysadmin so I bought it to see if it would work when I want to ssh into systems I'm physically near in racks. It has worked really well for this.
We live and have lived in a technological civilization for more than a hundred years. Legislators have NO EXCUSE to hide behind 'we don't understand the technology'. Sure computers are complex. But so are nuclear reactors, combustion engines and food safety.
If nuclear reactors cost 3x what they should, yet safety incidents occur 2x as often as they could because of stupid legislation, they shouldn't be able to hide behind 'we only have a legal diploma so we can't figure out what actuall works'.
For some reason, a lot of older folks consider computing as a 'low stakes game', as computers being either an annoyance or convenience but nothing more.
I don't know if the system is fundamentally flawed, and the people in charge are becoming less and less able to actually handle the reins of society and some major upheaval is necessary, or the system can be fixed as is, but this seems endemic and something should be done.
Wait, so is this about censorship, or about copyright?
If the latter, I don't see why CloudFlare is complaining about "global" censorship. The US would simply seize the domains (which they have done so many times before), but I guess Italy doesn't have that power...
Sometimes it's hard to differentiate between the 2. In this case it sounds like copyright in name but the implementation is such that it's a big hammer that can also be used for censorship if followed.
What is it with Southern Europe and the football overlords? Spain is blocking half the internet, Italy is fighting Cloudflare. What's up? Are football leagues big political donors?
Football is extremely popular, and football clubs (and their owners) are quite influential (socially and politically). But it's a little bigger than that.
EU is pushing for measures against live-event piracy[1], because they frame this as a systemic threat to cultural/economic systems, giving national regulators broad cover to act aggressively.
While football is quite huge in Europe at large, the impact to GDP of these broadcasting rights is sub-1%; however, lobbyists have a disproportionate impact: you have the leagues themselves (LaLiga and Serie A for Spain and Italy respectively), you have the football clubs, and you've got broadcasters. Combined, they swing quite high, even if the actual capital in play is much lower than the total they represent.
Add to this politicians who can frame these measures as "protecting our culture", get kickbacks in the form of free tickets to high profile games, see rapid action because blocks are immediately felt and very visible, and incentives for increased funding from regulatory agencies because "we need the budget to create the systems to coordinate this", and you can see how the whole system can push this way, even if it is a largely blunt instrument with massive collateral damage.
Yeah, in Europe, there tends to be an association between football fans and organized crime, just as there's one between unions and organized crime in the US.
The kind of hooligans who love beating up the hooligans from the other team are also perfect from beating up the hooligans from the opposing drug cartel.
In Spain's case Telefonica (largest telecom, used to be state owned) is private but has a large State participation and the government literally appointed the latest CEO.
Guess who sells the largest football games as part of their expensive TV package?
Guess who asked a judge to order the other telecoms to also block Cloudflare IPs?
If this is true, and seems likely. There is some satisfaction seeing corrupt cronyism agencies getting slapped with a hard "NO" when they are used to getting what they want.
No usually the political figures are football league owners.
Jokes aside, I don't know, the obsession with soccer is extreme in Italy. For people who don't care about soccer like I did, there is so much you have to endure just "because of soccer"
It's not just Italy. The UK is also insane along with some cities in Spain. In the UK one of the rivalries supposedly goes back to the War of the Roses [1].
The way I describe EU football games to Americans is take the craziest student section at a US college football game and extrapolate that energy to the entire stadium.
Spain especially but southern europe in general has a really crappy economy. Soccer teams are some of the wealthiest organizations in these countries, which means theyre the ones who are able to fund politicians which means they can get laws passed.
There's no accountability or due process. According to this brilliant law, if some crony with write-privilege adds your website to a list, the whole world has to ban your website within 30 minutes no questions asked.
Judicial oversight took a while in Germany, but it is there now (but I guess you will always find an incompetent judge if you really want). I wonder if cloudflare would implement the German blocklist now that we have judicial oversight. Currently it is as nice registry for pirating sites for anyone using 1.1.1.1 [1]
> To some extent, judges are subordinated to a cabinet minister, and in most instances this is a
minister of justice of either the federation or of one of the states. In Germany, the administration of
justice, including the personnel matters of judges, is viewed as a function of the executive branch of
government, even though it is carried out at the court level by the president of a court, and for the lower
courts, there is an intermediate level of supervision through the president of a higher court. Ultimately,
a cabinet minister is the top of this administrative structure. The supervision of judges includes
appointment, promotion and discipline. Despite this involvement of the executive branch in the
administration of justice, it appears that the independence of the German judiciary in making decisions
from the bench is guaranteed through constitutional principles, statutory remedies, and institutional
traditions that have been observed in the past fifty years. At times, however, the tensions inherent in this
organizational framework become noticeable and allegations of undue executive influence are made.
You're completely on the wrong track here. The discussion is not about who does or doesn't control the courts, it's about the question if someone who's rights have been violated can go to court or not with regard to that specific matter. If a court rules that blocking an IP address is illegal, the access provider has to stop blocking it. Period.
A fine doesn't cause immediate harm as you don't have to immediately pay it while you challenge it in court, having your IP or website blocked happens immediately and will continue harming you until it's decreted that it wasn't lawful.
Challenging the IP bans in Italy is stupidly hard. Your VM gets an IP address that was used a few months ago for soccer piracy? Too bad, you won't be able to access it from Italy.
2. parent comment is wrong, CCUI is requiring court action by their members before they act.
3. I rather have companies competing under market pressure to find solutions to topics like copyright infringement than the German state (once again) creating massive surveillance laws and technical infrastructure for their enforcement in -house.
Read the post, they never blocked the activist. They just changed what they replied to a DNS query of an already blocked site to make it harder to detect.
1. Article you've shared is from 2025-02-26
2. New rules have been in place from 2025-07
3. The author hasn't been blocked at all. You're either a liar or you cannot read.
At least with DMCA you so get a notice and you can somewhat challenge it. With Italy's Piracy Shield you have no notice and there's no public record of which IPs/websited have been blocked, so it's hard to even challenge it in court.
I agree with this sentiment.
His tweet was quite disingenuous and it doesn’t help that he’s tagging Musk and Vance. The noise they make about free speech is a charade.
I still can’t understand why these tech CEOs are doing so many cynical things even in places where they have the chance to start healthy debate.
yes, it's quite similar.
They blocked some lawful services too such as google drive (yes, really) and a TON of sites behind cloudflare by blocking some of its IPs (it happened a while ago, it's not directly related to this).
I would like to see a similar rant about the DMCA from US CEOs, which amounts to similar global effect. Not a great law but all this censorship stuff is bullshit.
To replicate the rant: Cloudflare on the otherhand blocks me regularly from using the Internet using a privacy aware browser because I fail to pass their bot checks so that I can enter their CDN based replica of a real internet.
To be fair big tech did do a full court press to stop site blocking when such a law (SOPA/PIPA) was proposed in the US, and they continue to oppose the MPA's attempts to get site blocking via the courts. DMCA on the other hand seems very broken, don't give the MPA the "3 strikes" regime they want and you get sued into the ground like Cox. I suspect tech CEOs don't complain about this because they don't want the same treatment.
AFAIK, the DMCA doesn't require infrastructure providers (ISPs, DNS resolvers, "relay" services like Cloudflare) to block entire websites. It's just for surgical removals of content (and blocking of ISP / hosting provider customers who are notorious infringers).
The US doesn't have the kind of website blocking laws that many European countries have.
If you look at those 'whole websites' it is nearly exclusively sites that do not comply with takedown requests regarding copyright (actually those blocking laws/procedures do mostly foresee any other reason). The question I was addressing is the judicial control and the abuse for censorship. DCMA takedown request are massively abused without any real judicial control. Sure you can fight those in court, but so you could fight ISP blocks. I thing the different methods simply stem from a different legal system with different types of fines (particularly in civil law)
Most Italian authorities like this one are chock full of incompetents, and I'm almost sure they're just caving in to some soccer broadcaster or some crap like that. He might very well be fully correct on the fact of the matter.
Still, the rhetoric of the post is frankly disgusting. No, I'm not taking lessons in democracy from JD Vance, thank you very much. No, I don't think that might makes right and it's unsurprising that those who believe otherwise are so eager to transparently suck up to this administration.
Making public threats in this way is just vice signaling, nice bait.
This is the Stephen Miller caveman view of the world, but it obviously doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than five seconds. It's a very straightforward consequence of refusing to ever admit you are wrong. "If I did it, then I must have had the right to do it."
It's just a refusal to accept the philosophical concept of rights. The right to vote doesn't exist because you didn't have to defeat the entire army to vote against their leader, it's just that the leader benevolently decided to let you vote against them. You don't have the right to life, it's just that everyone on the planet with a weapon has coincidentally decided not to murder you, for now. Laws don't actually exist. Any right that appeared to be established against the wishes of the men with guns (i.e. all of them) was actually fake or an inexplicable accident. You can imagine a world that works like this, but it certainly isn't our world. No historical period or even any fictional story I can think of operates like this.
Refusing to accept the philosophical concept of rights is just correct. You are born with fuck all unless people have decided you are entitled to something by existing. Plenty of people were born without anything remotely resembling rights. If rights were inherent and not simple enforced by people, that wouldn't be the case, would it? Life isn't a fairy tail.
Civilization is literally built on what you're saying being wrong.
It's not wrong because of physics or biology, but because civilization made it so.
Like so many cultural achievements, it's true when you can count on the person next to you expecting it to be true. (1)
Which in turn means you can make that culture collapse if you impress enough people with your edgelord attitude.
Cooperative culture is fragile and must be preserved by preserving shared values such as these. On the other hand, in the long run, the cultures that do this successfully prevail because cooperation is stronger than the law of the jungle.
Unfortunately that 'long run' may take a while.
(1) That's basically the definition of a cultural value. They're emergent phenomena based on Keynesian beauty contests.
Yes, and people have decided I'm entitled to something by existing. That's what human society and civilization is built on. It's been true for the entire history of our species.
> The right to vote doesn't exist because you didn't have to defeat the entire army to vote against their leader,
I would say you're wrong. The right to vote does exist because men rose up together and fought leaders that wouldn't let them vote. And, when leaders rise up that take our right to vote and we don't stop them they will prevail.
> it's just that everyone on the planet with a weapon has coincidentally decided not to murder you, for now.
Correct. Start up a big disaster where food goes away for some reason and it comes back.
We have a stable world where we don't kill each other at the moment because in general we all have food, water, shelter, and I would say enough entertainment that fighting each other isn't worth the risk. There is no rule that says this will last forever. Quite often in history there have been stable times, that then fell apart because of greed and malice of leaders.
I am not saying it's impossible for rights to be taken away, I am arguing against this statement:
> If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights.
I do not own a gun and I have no fighting skills, so I cannot defend myself against men with guns. Would you agree that I therefore have no rights?
I think that you and the original poster are seeing the situation "you are vulnerable to potentially losing rights in the future", which is true, but conflating that with "you have no rights". It's like telling a rich person "you actually don't have any money" because it's possible they might be robbed someday.
You have the right to vote, if you lose that right, and you don't have a gun after that you have whatever 'rights' that are provided to you by a dictator.
One of the things you're missing here is the idea of herd immunity. While you won't fight for your rights, theoretically someone else will making taking your rights dangerous. Once enough people won't fight for their rights, or enough of the population gathers together to take your rights, you lose your rights.
I believe that in this conversation one party is saying that people have intrinsic rights (see the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and the other party might agree on that but they say that those rights can be enforced only if they can be defended. Example: both parties probably agree that people have a right to free speech but nevertheless people end up in jail if they attempt free speech on the wrong subject in the wrong country.
> it obviously doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than five seconds. [...] It's just a refusal to accept the philosophical concept of rights.
Or it's an attempt to reconcile the philosophical concept of rights with global politics and observed reality.
Does an Afghan girl have a right to education? A Uyghur Muslim a right to freedom of religion? A Palestinian a right to food? A Hong Kong resident a right to freedom of expression?
It would appear that in these cases, the politicians commanding the loyalty of the men with guns do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.
Of course, that's not the only reasonable line of thinking. Just because people in distant lands don't have certain rights in practice, I have those rights because I live in a great country with strong institutions and the rule of law.
> Because all it takes is men with guns to change what rights you think you have.
Plenty folks of didn't / don't change their minds about what rights they thought they had/have, even in the face of guns. Just look at what's currently going in Iran.
If you're in the US, and believe in your own Constitution, then people have "unalienable Rights" that are "endowed by their Creator", regardless of whether they are recognized by the government or not:
You're conflating rights with freedoms, which is the same category error as confusing legality with morality.
Your rights are, by their nature inalienable. They are recognized (or not) by individual power structures, granting you freedoms.
Under an authoritarian regime, your freedoms maybe be limited, for example, your right to free speech may be curtailed by men with guns. Killing those men is illegal, but not unethical, exactly because they are infringing your rights.
This all may seem academic to the person with a boot on their throat, but it dictates how outsiders view one's actions.
> If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights.
My sister is wheelchair bound with MS. Half the time she can barely see. You can give her all the guns you want and she isn't going be to able to defend herself. I reject your nonsense assertion that because of this she has no rights.
this kind of logic will always lead to everyone losing in the long run. always. there will always be a more powerful bully that steps up to take over. history is very clear on this one.
You might be conflating description with prescription.
Descriptively, powerful people have all the rights and weak people have none. This is what we observe in the world. No amount of philosophical thought outweighs actual observations. For example, Donald Trump has (retroactively!) the right to r**e ch*ldren. We know this because he is not suffering consequences for doing that. But Renee Good did not have a right to free speech. We know this because she was executed because of her speech.
You can prescribe whatever fancy academia language you want, but the facts in the real world don't seem to currently support any of it beyond "might makes rights".
Ok. So a man with a gun has the right to shoot you and kill you.
Then a policeman comes with a bigger gun and he has the right to kidnap the murderer.
Then comes a judge with an even bigger gun (the law) and has the right to lock him up in a prison.
But then the murderer gets hold of a weapon and he has the right to escape from prison.
Etc.
I'll cut the cheekiness, I disagree with a "authoritarian regime". I don't support everything, but to some up an entire government as "authoritarian regime" is wrong IMO.
What does make them? Children apparently don't have them, and many races in many countries didn't have them for a long time either. How do you account for that? Are we now distinguishing between "having" rights and uh... being allow to use them?
> No, I'm not taking lessons in democracy from JD Vance, thank you very much
You are falling into a trap where you can not recognize a true point because it is made by someone you disagree with. I don't condone Vance or the Trump admin. He is right about European governemnt's attacks on free speech.
And you are falling into the trap of thinking that if a person is busy deconstructing what used to be one of the larger democracies in the world that their other words are going to be taken at face value, which obviously is not going to happen.
We're not discussing Pol Pot's views on cooking either, even though he might have had some valuable insight. Bringing up Vance and Musk in polite conversation to bolster your argument is - especially in the context of Europe, which both men seem to have declared to be enemy #1 before Russia and China - a little tone deaf.
To be fair, he's not bringing them up as intellectual support for his argumentative base – he's bringing them up as support for acts of retaliation. This is mostly about power and we've lost 30% in power vs. the US in just ~12 years because we've fucked up our economy.
I absolutely and 100% agree! But it's the stick that others will use to force their world view down your throat. So if you want to be not only righteous, but also hold others accountable according to your standards, you need the economic power to do so.
People will say anything online, but when it comes to action very little. I'd rather live in the US now or 12 years ago vs Italy unless someone gave me a tuscan villa with a pool
Oh I've been multiple times, it's beautiful! But vacationing is not living + working, paying bills, dealing with bureaucracy or culture clashes, etc...
Most of our power loss is from electing a belligerent dumb fuck twice and allowing him to sabotage our international relationships and destroying our remaining credibility.
I was speaking about Europe as a whole. Economically, we suck. Losing UK didn't help, either, but except for Poland, we've become relatively poorer by an insane amount, compared to the US. Another 10 years on that path and we're half the US.
> And you are falling into the trap of thinking that if a person is busy deconstructing what used to be one of the larger democracies in the world that their other words are going to be taken at face value, which obviously is not going to happen.
No. I'm identifying this one statement as factual, regardless of the person saying it. Surely then, you would not deny the color of the sun to be yellow just because Pot might have observed it to be that way?
That's besides the point: JD Vance and Musk are precisely the wrong entities to have opinions on stuff like this because they are on the wrong side of that line most of the time. Especially Musk, but Vance has his own ulterior motives to berate the EU on anything so regardless of the outcome it will be tainted.
> JD Vance and Musk are precisely the wrong entities to have opinions on stuff like this because they are on the wrong side of that line most of the time. Especially Musk, but Vance has his own ulterior motives to berate the EU on anything so regardless of the outcome it will be tainted.
People focus on Vance in this issue because they hate him and hate is easy to come by. They ignore that popular Democrats and progressives said the same thing. Hell, even the Atlantic posted a piece about the issue.
It has been very clear that the Trump adminstrations definition of freedom of speech, including JD Vance's, is that you should be free to say whatever the Trump administration wants and nothing else.
They have consistently prosecuted, threatened, deported, withheld money from, and so on people who say things they do not like.
And the answer to that is to point out the hypocrisy (what you're doing), not to take the opposite view, that censorship is important (what so many others are doing when Trump takes a position on anything).
you are falling into the trap of ignoring the pandering. cloudflare bro is clearly pandering here and showing that, in the moment, he will say/do whatever to whomever to get what he wants. cloudflare kind of has a history of doing this.
there was zero reason to name drop vance and elon besides appealing to their rabid fans to bolster support.
What other option do they have? It’s either comply with unjust rulings that undermine the free internet (and their business) or make a deal with the devil. Either one is bad but only complying has an immediate negative impact.
If there was any sense that this ruling was just a temporary mistake that will be corrected by pending regulation/legislation, then a third option would be on the table: temporarily comply and wait it out. But all indications are that the EU is hell-bent on making things worse, not better, for the open internet.
Cloudflare, the company that regularly blocks me from legitimately visiting websites because their bot detection software absolutely sucks probably is the biggest effective censor on the planet.
The AI generated art is also disgusting. Makes the CEO look like an angry kid because his multi-billion dolar industry got a 1% income fine, which is nothing for them, for a service they provide that keeps having outages because they have bad coders who thought moving their shit code to Rust was a good idea.
>as usual, a law was created without verifying how the implementation of such law would work in practice (something very common in Italy), and this is the result.
This is everywhere.
The reason is you DONT want a law to be too detailed with tech mumbo jombo. If too detailed, it will get outdated. See that USA crypto wars ban in the 90s.
I recently learned that Poland literally has a law on the books[1] (from the executive, not the legislative), mandating our use of SOAP and WSDL. You're definitely right on that score. As far as I know, it's supported by some EU directive or other, no less.
And I think that when you are so far biased in one direction there is nothing these two could do to alter your opinion in anyway. Thus making it irrelevant to the discussion.
Why? Because tech companies have shown to bbe honest and transparent? Because their flouting of the law has ever been anything but extreme self interest?
FFS Grok is openly a revenge porn and CSAM generator. These aren’t good people and they aren’t the sort we want as champions of speech because they are not interested in anything but their own profits.
I also wonder why he felt emboldened to escalate like this. Maybe he thinks Italy is so small it can be slapped around by a rage post on Twitter?
There's a DNS blocklist from media industry applied by German ISPs and I assume Cloudflare was also asked to block these websites, so why didn't I read a story about Cloudflare making a big stir about the German DNS blocking?
Posting it a hundred times doesn't make your claim more correct. If your rights are infringed, you can always go to court. If you think you being blocked from accessing certain information is an infringement of Art. 2 Abs. 1 GG ("Every person shall have the right to free development of his personality [...]"), you can drag this to The Federal Constitutional Court.
No I can't, since I lack the monetary funds. My claim stands correct, going to the federal constitutional court is expensive enough that many people are barred from that option. My claim stands correct - no judicial verdict is needed for the CUII to censor websites. Don't believe me. Believe the activists [1].
new comment: you're so wrong that not even the opposite of your statement would be true. CUII is a private body, but it forces its members to go to court before they ask CUII to initiate a block:
Jede DNS-Sperre einer strukturell urheberrechtsverletzenden Webseite (SUW) wird im Rahmen der CUII gerichtlich überprüft.
Das ist freiwillige Selbstverpflichtung der CUII-Mitglieder. Denn eigentlich besteht kein Richtervorbehalt für die Sperransprüche nach § 8 Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz (DDG). Aus diesem Grund sind auch die DNS-Sperren nach dem alten Verhaltenskodex mit behördlicher Beteiligung zulässig gewesen (Siehe Fragen: “Was verändert sich durch den neuen Verhaltenskodex der CUII?” und “Warum gab es zum Juli 2025 - nach jahrelanger Arbeit - einen Systemwechsel in der CUII?”).
old comment: CUII is not a governmental body so what the hell should they need a court order for when doing the thing that their members pay them to do? If your not happy with your internet access provider being a member of CUII, switch your internet access provider. I agree that CUII should publish a list of blocked domains as part of transparent communication and proving that they are doing a good job.
the filters the Italian authorities complain about also only apply in italy.
It's likely a process thing, Italy has had website bans since forever, but the new regulation applies _without going through a judge_. Some copyright holders can say "this website is infringing" and ISPs, CDNs etc.. are required to shut them down immediately.
A similar system was introduced in Spain, with the same problems, for the same reason (football $$$).
EDIT: to be clear, CF argues that they need to block the DNS globally, and that's unreasonable. The Italian authority argues that they have the skills to do a local block and are just being uncooperative.
> EDIT: to be clear, CF argues that they need to block the DNS globally, and that's unreasonable. The Italian authority argues that they have the skills to do a local block and are just being uncooperative.
Similar to the UK's attempt to try and get noncompliant sites like Imgur and 4chan to block themselves from serving content to UK locations, I think the responsibility for country-wide blocks lies with the country attempting to regulate the space, not CDNs or websites.
I don't doubt that Italy is correct that CF has the technical ability do a local block like they're asking for, but I also don't see how CF is in any way (legally) compelled to do so. Whether or not Italy (or any country) is capable of doing so, or paying contractors for an appropriate solution, isn't CF's problem either.
The difference is that Imgur/4chan have no presence in the UK but Cloudflare has servers and probably a sales office in Italy. Cloudflare does have to follow Italian law within Italy.
Either Cloudflare can block pirate sites or ISPs will completely block Cloudflare (as seen in Spain). Which way do you prefer?
Do you think the Italian bureaucrats really want to ban something in France or Germany?
The Cloudflare CEO is clearly misinterpreting something that was lost in translation, which is the bureaucrats stating "Cloudflare must prevent access to XY from everywhere". For bureaucrats "everywhere" means "in my jurisdiction". I cannot believe that the Cloudflare CEO is trying to nitpick around a single word that he so clearly misinterprets.
I'm pretty sure Cloudflare is an ISP according to German law ("Diensteanbieter" according to DDG). You might confuse "ISP" with the terminology of "Access Provider" according to the (now defunct) §8 TMG.
If that were true, sci-hub.se would be blocked in Germany on 1.1.1.1 (1dot1dot1dot1.cloudflare-dns.com), it isn't blocked, therefore it's not true. (Modus tollens)
I am a Service Provider ("Diensteanbieter") according to DDG and I don't block a single page, which makes your statement not only wrong, but rather so wrong that not even the complete opposite would make any sense.
What is the escalation? Cloudflare or any company is free to stop doing business in any country which mistreats them or doesn't align with their interest. How can you interpret this in some way as Cloudflare being the aggressor? They don't owe the nation of Italy anything.
Regardless of whether the law is absurd or not (I honestly have no idea, but we've seen some crazy stuff lately in the EU), its kinda precious that a CEO only complains about it when his company is fined.
I'm certain it is also quite reassuring for any paying Cloudflare customer that the company strategy is driven by the CEO Twitter rants; That if by some reason doesn't want to play ball with local laws (as draconian as they may be) and the company is fined, his public reaction is threatening to leave the country. Its not the first time he does this, and certainly it won't be the last. This communication style gets old fast, and IMO this actually hurts the company - I'm a free tier user and would never subscribe any paid products. I think their tech is amazing, they surely have great engineers, but I don't feel comfortable financing a company that thinks it is above the law.
The icing on the cake is the plea for a free internet; You know what a free internet looks like? A network that doesn't make half its content inaccessible because someone in a major company did a mistake on a SQL query. Or a network that isn't controlled by a company that basically just said "we're tight with the US government, so f** your laws".
He did mention that they were fighting the law before they were fined and they plan to challenge the fine in court.
He has also been vocal about other similar legislation before they were enacted or the company got fined (not sure about this specific one though).
So I don't think it's fair to characterize it as he "only complains about it when his company is fined".
He's giving Italy and Italians fair warning that he will abandon the Italian market to avoid being subject to their laws, and I think it will go that way. I guess it's up to the Italians to find a replacement.
Can't have a global edge network without also being a big player - something Cloudflare is disliked for. You're suggesting everyone move to a new provider, so we can dislike the new vendor instead?
Likely because it mentions JD Vance and the current US administration in a positive light, since they have rightly shone a bright light on the active decline of free speech in Europe.
I've had the pleasure of working for CEOs who don't resort to public threats (or all caps) to get their point across. When I chose who leads me or who I work with stability and consistency are key. This just sounds like a man who thinks he can flex his way out of a problem and that is just such a short sited way to solve problems. Not my kind of CEO.
> financing a company that thinks it is above the law
I've never liked arguments like this, because laws are often complex, unreasonable, and unjust, and all of us (both individuals and companies) routinely use our best judgment to decide which laws to flout and which to follow, and when, where, and why to do so.
I share that perspective. Being an international company is a challenging thing regards law. You have to operate in best intent, and judges respect that.
And sure, some laws and most likely this one, are stupid. I always take GDPR as an example. Annoying as fuck, but a good regulation. Well written, well executed and hits its goal.
However, disrespecting and being tone deaf in communication is wrong, ignoring the intent (Italian based legal control of IP violations) is wrong and treating the Internet as a legal free space (or only accept US perspective) is wrong. Italy is a sovereign state and the Internet is operating there and on its citizens. It has all right and duty to do so. We have to respect that.
> And sure, some laws and most likely this one, are stupid. I always take GDPR as an example. Annoying as fuck, but a good regulation. Well written, well executed and hits its goal.
It's funny people normally use GDPR as an example of a law so poorly written and implemented that the sites of the very EU governments that passed it are still not in compliance a decade later.
For real. Laws likee anti-circumvention laws are a horrible plague on humanity. There's all kinds of nonsense & so often businesses have far too much sway or outright grasp over the legal system.
You can't be a hacker without having any Question Authority backbone or will. You don't have to be full onboard but very few nations seem capable of behaving at all reasonably when it comes to technology. And few even have the chance to do right: American corporate empire has insisted countries adopt particularly brutal ip laws for decades, and made trade contingent upon it.
Style aside, what do you think he should do? Faced with a law that not only imposes disproportionate fines (more than revenue from the country), but on the surface also requires blocking globally, there are really only a few things to do:
The government complains everyday about the judges and it's trying to make a referendum to make judges angry, so I wouldn't say courts do what govt says
how ever did you reach that conclusion? For 1, his tweet literally says "That, of course, is DISGUSTING and even before yesterday’s fine we had multiple legal challenges pending against the underlying scheme." 2 is something that happens behind the doors, and it's rather uncharitable to just assume he skipped it.
Crying free speech and attempting to rile up the tech bros is just what companies do these days.
It doesn't matter if, like this issue, it has absolutely nothing to do with free speech; if you position yourself as a defender of the "open internet", "open source", "free thinking" or "innovation" you get every dingleberry that hangs off Musk to come and defend you.
American free speech as of 2026 includes openly threatening to invade European territory unless it is given away.
It's funny how America can force it's own crappy content protection laws to the entire globe, but another country can't have their own.
The current administration is burning good will to America with it's allies at an alarming rate. This isn't good for stability or world order. I think this year is could be a contender to be the worst one yet of this millennium as we find other despots empowered by America's actions.
> I don't feel comfortable financing a company that thinks it is above the law
Of all the companies to make that claim about in 2026, Cloudflare would not be very high on the list I would think... Also, hopefully you're not paying for any genAI services and making that statement?
The appeal to JD Vance is properly craven and validates the view that their business model is effectively a protection racket.
Recall the unsavoury episode with taviso, when they lobbied the FTC to investigate him after he helped clean up their mess during Cloudbleed. They always pivot to aggression when challenged.
> The appeal to JD Vance is properly craven and validates the view that their business model is effectively a protection racket.
It's not craven, it's a mistake. It needlessly antagonizes the market at large to solve a smaller problem. I don't see how this benefits Cloudflare in the long run unless they've decided to throw in their lot with the current US regime. If so, what happens when that regime changes?
I mean I dislike JD Vance as much as the next guy, but I don't see how it's unreasonable to appeal to the federal government for assistance in dealing with international legal issues. That's very much in the government's remit.
You do when the fine is more than double your annual revenue in the foreign nation, has international and geopolitical implications, impacts many other US businesses, could harm foreign relations, and will harm regular US citizens.
That's exactly the type of thing the Executive Branch is supposed to deal with.
Executive branch is supposed to deal with other countries' laws and courts? Does it also hold for European executive branches and American laws? I don't want to even imagine a world that works like this.
> Does it also hold for European executive branches and American laws?
Yes, if a US law is overreaching and directly impacting people in the EU. That is literally how the world works in practice so I'm not sure what to tell you.
CLOUD act is overreaching and impacting people in the EU. What EU governments are doing is avoiding US-based cloud services for critical applications, because it's an US law, not a European one
Thank they should act like it and respect the laws of the countries.
If you run to the US executive to assert US understanding of law onto other countries you are geopolitical important, however, as a tool for the US national interest not as a true international company. A true international company would serve their customers in their legal systems. Fight the laws there, try to make them better, but don't strongarm them with other country forces. They are a sovereign country.
When a country is trying to impose extra-territorial laws, then it goes beyond enforcing their sovereignty, and it is completely reasonable for the affected to request diplomatic intervention.
It would be nice if we had an international agreement on how to apply sovereignity on the internet without infinging on sovereignity of other countries. US would be in a great position to initiate this if the current administration had any understanding of what "international agreement", "sovereignity" or "other countries" means.
Well the law is surely addressing European/Italian citizens and business. If you serve them from the US and target Italians for financial gain, you are no longer extraterritorial because you operate there as a business.
They have all right to sanction or restrict a company which has a legal footprint in their territory.
When you are incorporating as a company in a country you are subject to their laws. Period. If that includes rules how you act worldwide, than that is a part of it.
Do not get me wrong, restricting free speech or apply IP law outside your territory is IMHO not right for a country to do.
Why would Italy pick Cloudflare over Bunny.net or even CDNetworks if Cloudflare can't follow their laws? Today US tech products sell well in Europe because of the past 80 years of positive relationships. So Cloudflare is the obvious choice over CDNetworks, but for how long will it be like that?
When the risks are too high, then exit the market. When you do business in a market, adhere to the laws there.
It is however the business of governments to foster harmonized (globalized) markets. But the US has killed so many regulations and collaborations in the last year, that there is little hope that this will improve any time soon. They do not want globalization anymore but American first. Reactions of other countries will be higher fines, more regulation and higher entry barriers.
> When the risks are too high, then exit the market. When you do business in a market, adhere to the laws there.
And when you want help to improve your terms of trade, you can petition your government to assist.
> It is however the business of governments to foster harmonized (globalized) markets.
It is the business of governments to further the interests and wishes of their people.
> But the US has killed so many regulations and collaborations in the last year, that there is little hope that this will improve any time soon.
Is Italy's actions here fostering "harmonized (globalized) markets", I wonder?
> They do not want globalization anymore but American first.
If globalization is what Americans want, then that is what their government should be accommodating. If it's not, then the government should not.
Even if "the experts" think something is right or wrong, even if some economic factor or other might objectively improve with a particular policy, it should be up to the people to decide. Self-determination is one of the most fundamental human rights there is, too often ignored by the ruling class.
Well first off, generally if you are arrested in another country you would in fact call your government. Most people do this, and it'd be foolish not to. If you get sued for a large amount of money or defrauded or face any number of other issues, also reasonable to call your government.
Anyway, not a great comparison because you're talking about legal regulations governing speech on the internet. This isn't a jaywalking ticket, it's a deeply complex regulatory issue involving politics, law and international relations. It's also an issue that the current administration has shown interest in, so if you're an affected American business it would be pretty foolish not to seek help there.
I’m not sure whose business model you’re referring to, Cloudflare or Trump/Vance? Or sounds like the former, but I’m not sure how that appeal “validates the view…”.
while the spirit of your statement is clear , i dont think its 'properly craven' to recognise both an individual's faults and their strengths - in this case the author goes to lengths to state he does not necessarily agree with either musk or vance. has anybody successfully recieved protection from this US administration while acknowledging fault of said administration ? from outside this doesnt seem likely as US politics is currently operating like team sports (ie. no tolerance of toeing party lines, 'youre either with us or against us')
Not a good look on that guy to list his "pro-bono" services and threaten to pull them while asking JD Vance for his help.
How is he expecting the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics to influence some representative of media right holders who have fined Cloudflare? Is he assuming that just because all of the listed things are Italian they can just make the fine go away?
This is taking place in a larger geopolitical context. He is applying whatever pressure that Cloudflare can apply on its own (not much), and he mentions Vance as a way to call for US administration help at a time when the US is entering an open economic conflict with Europe. Tech and speech regulation is a central feature of that conflict.
IMHO this is a time when there are no good players. I support CF’s fight to keep the internet open against encroaching EU regulation while also acknowledging that the US has been a recurring bad actor here. I am not as anti-Cloudflare as some (I have no problem with their pro free speech policies) but I do think centralization of infrastructure is a bad thing, and CF encourages that.
Wasn't 1.1.1.1 explicitly created to help people in countries with government internet restrictions to get around them?
100% support whatever Cloudflare has to do to win this fight. IMO the timing of something like this in the middle of the Elon + X vs UK censorship fight with the current administration providing support is probably the best case scenario.
People aren't going to want to hear that, but in this case it's probably true.
> Wasn't 1.1.1.1 explicitly created to help people in countries with government internet restrictions to get around them?
No, it was explicitly created to receive and study the stream of "garbage traffic" being sent to 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1, which were previously held by APNIC and donated to Cloudflare on this basis. https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/
> APNIC's research group held the IP addresses 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. While the addresses were valid, so many people had entered them into various random systems that they were continuously overwhelmed by a flood of garbage traffic. APNIC wanted to study this garbage traffic but any time they'd tried to announce the IPs, the flood would overwhelm any conventional network.
> We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. We offered Cloudflare's network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.
By these quotes, it was created to serve "a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system", and the service of help in studying the garbage traffic was offered in exchange for gaining controll of the address(es).
"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
I think this clearly shows the hubris of Cloudflare CEO. Cloudflare is simply not important enough in Europe, and he unnecessarily provided a scapegoat "evil US tech company" for European media and politicians to slaughter. In terms of corporate politics it's not clever for him to attach his name to this issue, why not let legal handle this through EU lobby channels the same way other US tech companies do it in Europe.
I'm not saying it is. I think there's a pretty broad agreement that those sites are bad, and less of them is good.
It's much less obvious that we want private corporations (or governments) picking and choosing which sites are good or bad. And from Cloudflare's position, a policy of "we don't police content" is more defensible than "we don't police content, except of this one in particular". These definitely aren't the only two horrible, racist websites Cloudflare has hosted.
IIRC (and take this memory with a grain of salt), one thing that angered eastdakota about Stormfront was that they kept saying something like "Cloudflare hasn't kicked us off, so they're okay with us" or something like that. And obviously that doesn't hold water, unless Cloudflare has chosen to kick of some sites, it lends some credence to the remaining ones.
I'm undecided where I stand on it. I'd like them to take actions like this in a principled way. (And I'm happy to accept that there's no clear line to draw, nor that it can be enforced with 100% accuracy, but if you're drawing a line, do it thoughtfully and broadcast it so you know ahead of time if you're in their gray area.)
"Tech and speech regulation is a central feature of that conflict"
The only conflict is that Europeans don't want Russian Misinformation and Manipulation from foreign powers onto them. It's no accident that Musks X serves preferentially content from European Far-Right Parties.
The US used the same argument for their TikTok-Ban/Forced Takeover. They also don't make a secret out of their plan to push the far-right to end the EU. They even wrote about this in their new National Security Strategy
>They also don't make a secret out of their plan to push the far-right to end the EU.
How is the "far right" gonna end "the EU"? When my GF walks alone at night through the parks she's never EVER afraid of the mythical far right for her safety, but the other people the far left won't let us talk about without being called a label and being cancelled from MSM for having common sense opinions.
So if the EU were to find its end, it will be 100% at the hand of its own making, from years of corruption and financial mismanagement, from years of pushing unpopular open borders far left policies that nobody was asked it they agree with them or not. That's what will end the EU. Not Musk, not X, not Putin, not Trump, but the EU bureaucrats and their unpopular policies who then use boogiemen like X and "russian misinformation" and "far right" as scapegoats to deflect from their failures like this:
Corruption being exposed on X? Must be Russian misinformation. Illegal migrant crime exposed on X. Must be far right misinformation. Epstein Files? Democrat hoax. Etc but you get the point.
Politicians hate accountability and media channels they can't control like X that risk exposing their mistakes and corruption. They want full control of media to tell you what's acceptable to think, since the internet and social media made traditional state controlled media obsolete. They don't want control of social media and user ID verification to "protect the children", they want it to protect themselves from criticism and accountability from you.
It's not Elon's or Trump's or Putin's or the far right's fault the healthcare in my country has been on a decline for 10+ years. It's not their fault wages are stagnating but property prices are skyrocketing which is what most voters care about. That's the fault of the ECB fiscal policies. It's not their fault public safety is down and crime is up. That's the fault of EU border control and irresponsible migration policies. Etc. you get the point.
So it's disingenuous at best and bad faith at worst, to ignore these long going systemic issues the EU has self inflicted on its voters, and just blame the far right for the backlash it has inevitably lead to.
You're making it sound way more dramatic than it is [1]. And yes X is a far right echo chamber that twists the narrative so that the extreme right get the most support out of it. X is the biggest help for foreign power to sow discord among us [2]
I'm sure you understand the fact that an alliance of countries is not held together by the absence of serial killers hiding in parks at night, yeah? Europe has rather famous historical knowledge of what the far right can do, and how it can destroy a country, and it has nothing to do with parks at night.
>Europe has rather famous historical knowledge of what the far right can do, and how it can destroy a country
Since you brought up European history, let me ask you where the far right came from in WW2 Europe. Did they just suddenly come out of nowhere and manage to take over a continent just like that without having majority popular support amongst the population? Or was it an organic growth gaining political support feeding off the backlash to failed policies of previous administrations in Europe?
Because history is repeating itself right now and you're either not seeing it because you don't know the answer to the historial question above, or you are ignoring it because you don't like it and you hope the solution lies in draconical measures against far right parties as if that will magically to turn all those displeased citizens to stop supporting far right, and not making it worse by radicalizing them even further leading to more extremism which is what is actually gonna happen.
You're basically creating a self fulfilling prophecy with this attitude of putting all the blame and focus of state failures on the far right.
> and it has nothing to do with parks at night
It 100% has everything to do with that. Because if you import millions of potentially dangerous and culturally incompatible people from dangerous low trust societies into (formerly) safe European high trust societies, against the will of the majority of your voters making them now feel unsafe in their own countries, and you refuse to backtrack on your unpopular policies, then voting far right is the only peaceful and democratic option the voters have to express their displeasure with your policies.
And you can only ignore, ban and suppress the demands of the far right parties for so long, until they become the majority of the voter base, and then you're fucked and the prophecy you were trying to stop fulfills itself, the far right takes power and uses all the political weapons you built to suppress them against you. Just like 80 years ago.
Like I said before, people are doomed to have history repeats itself on themselves because people never learn, or they learn the wrong lessons due to ideological biases giving themselves a false sense of moral superiority over the others they disagree with.
You see this societal failure on HN as well, with my comments here getting flagged even though they didn't break any rules and haven't been factually proven wrong via debate, yet people will reject and try to silence them them without arguments or debate, same as they reject the other views that don't conform to their bubble.
There is a big difference between right to free speech by citizens of a certain country vs. someone working in the military propaganda unit of a foreign country who artificially amplifies their opinion thousandfold while masquerading as a citizen of the victim country with ultimate goal to harm the victim country.
You are focusing on identity and intent, e.g you are defending the restriction of speech based on who is speaking and why. Knowing the difference between an opinion of an origin you consider valid and one you consider invalid is difficult enough that one can abuse that justification to censor "real" speech by citizens.
Ivan from St. Petersburg calls himself "Heinz Müller" and creates a Telegram group that reports about immigrant crime in my neighborhood, trying to fool elderly citizens with lack of social media experience into believing his fake news stories. It's a proven approach and Ivan's main job. If Ivan would've been born in another country, he simply would've tried to scam elderly citizens, but because he was born in russia he works for the propaganda unit so he doesn't get sent to a meat assault on the frontlines.
In his free time Ivan comes to HN and poses as a free speech absolutist.
Well you see, <my side>'s swarm intelligence is organic and honest and people from <other side> are bots.
Jokes aside, the Harris campaign openly manipulated Reddit to get their opinions on the top [1]. I was there on election night. The entire site slowed to a crawl. Opinions of people you normally never read gained hundreds to thousands of upvotes. It felt organic for exactly one day.
If the plan is to sow division, it would be really weird to always only try to play one side. If I was trying to stir division, I would make sure to play all sides for maximum effect. But apparently other commentators here think only one side is being played and its always the same one.
So you are basically arguing that it's hard to distinguish, therefore we shouldn't try. By that logic, we couldn't prosecute fraud because it's sometimes hard to distinguish from aggressive marketing, or couldn't have espionage laws because it's hard to distinguish from journalism.
The distinction isn't about "valid" vs "invalid" opinions, as you framed it, it's just about authenticity and coordination. A Russian citizen genuinely expressing pro Kremlin views on their personal account is exercising speech. A state funded operation running hundreds of fake accounts pretending to be American citizens, artificially amplifying divisive content, is something different, it's basically a form of information warfare.
And what I write here isn't theoretical, coordinated influence operations have inflamed ethnic tensions from the Balkans to Myanmar, not to mention Russian-Ukraininan conflict propaganda. These aren't just "opinions we disagree with", they're documented operations with measurable effects on real world violence. I mean this is a form of war, in which some countries want to destroy your society fabric for their advantage.
Every democracy already makes this distinction in other domains. Foreign governments can't donate to political campaigns. Foreign agents must register when lobbying. Do you call them violations of free speech? They're just acknowledgments that coordinated foreign influence is fundamentally different from citizen discourse.
The difficulty of drawing lines doesn't mean no lines exist.
> So you are basically arguing that it's hard to distinguish, therefore we shouldn't try
No, I said because it's hard to distinguish, therefore we can not use it as an excuse to enact censorship.
> By that logic, we couldn't prosecute fraud
Fraud is illegal.
> couldn't have espionage laws
Espionage is illegal.
No matter what you do or what you write, enacting "desinformation laws" would require a ministry of truth to decide what is fact and what isn't, a task governments are famously incredibly bad at because they always have vested interests in not telling the truth.
> A state funded operation running hundreds of fake accounts pretending to be American citizens, artificially amplifying divisive content, is something different, it's basically a form of information warfare
And yet it is still speech and not distinguishable from genuine Russians sharing their opinions. It is easy to refute the opinions of many a people by discrediting them to be of the origin of a manufactured propaganda machine. Once you start doing this for foreign people, the next logical step is to continue this strategy for local activists or political opponents.
> And what I write here isn't theoretical, coordinated influence operations have inflamed ethnic tensions from the Balkans to Myanmar, not to mention Russian-Ukraininan conflict propaganda. These aren't just "opinions we disagree with", they're documented operations with measurable effects on real world violence. I mean this is a form of war, in which some countries want to destroy your society fabric for their advantage
I know this to be factual. I'm not denying it's existence at all. I'm making a point here. I don't want the government to hold these tools you propose. Any law enacted and every power given will not only be wielded by a government of parties you support, but also at one point by factions you disagree with entirely.
You are all over this thread in god knows how many comments arguing about Germany and world wide censorship whereas this thread - and the fine - is about copyright and Italy. The second they use it for anything else I'll be happy to jump the line but until then they are - for once - using this law as it is intended and it doesn't really matter that there are other unrelated wrongs that you could commit using the same mechanism.
I am hurt when I think I am hearing words from a fellow citizen that are their own opinion, when instead it is a foreign actor pushing a narrative for their state.
I am all for free speech, but I am not for anonymous speech which is choking the internet. If I am in person speaking with you, I can be fairly certain that you aren't actually a completely different person underneath a rubber mask. I want to at least know that an account I am speaking to is a _person_ and not a robot, although Id probably want country of origin too.
I do not have a good answer for how to achieve that without having a chilling effect on speech, but maybe that's a good thing? I go back and forth on if its better or not to require you to say who you are if you want to say something in public.
> I am hurt when I think I am hearing words from a fellow citizen that are their own opinion, when instead it is a foreign actor pushing a narrative for their state.
No you are not.
> I am all for free speech, but I am not for anonymous speech which is choking the internet
Then you are not for free speech. Have you ever considered from your point of view that anonymity is incredibly valuable to people who live under an oppressive regime, like Iran or Russia?
> I want to at least know that an account I am speaking to is a _person_ and not a robot, although Id probably want country of origin too.
I too, want many things. That does not give me the right to unveil people who wish to be anonymous. It's pretty wild that this is an opinion on hacker news, of all sites.
The issue I have with your argument is that you're treating inaction as neutral. It isn't. Choosing not to act against coordinated foreign influence operations is itself a choice with consequences. If a hostile state can freely run thousands of fake accounts to inflame divisions, amplify extremism, and erode trust in institutions (and we deliberately tie our hands) then we're not preserving some pristine free speech environment. I mean we're ceding the information space to whoever is willing to manipulate it most aggressively.
The "marketplace of ideas" doesn't function when one participant is a state apparatus with unlimited resources pretending to be thousands of organic voices.
Your slippery slope argument applies to laws we already have and accept. Lets take US as an example, the Foreign Agents Registration Act has existed since 1938. Foreign campaign contributions are illegal. These laws require distinguishing foreign influence from domestic speech. By your logic, these should have already devolved into tools of domestic political persecution. Have they? Imperfect enforcement, sure. But "the government of a faction I disagree with might someday abuse this" hasn't been a reason to repeal FARA.
Another issue that I have with your argument is that you've identified risks of action but proposed nothing. What's your actual framework here? If coordinated foreign information warfare is real and harmful, and ongoing (which you acknowledge) what should democracies do? I mean if your answer is "nothing, because any tool could theoretically be abused" then you are not offering any policy, right? but basically you are arguing for resignation.
> The issue I have with your argument is that you're treating inaction as neutral.
The issue I have with your argument is that you're treating action as a necessary evil enacted by a well meaning government. It isn't.
> I mean we're ceding the information space to whoever is willing to manipulate it most aggressively.
I am well aware that this is a difficult thing to solve. What is it then, that you propose we do?
> These laws require distinguishing foreign influence from domestic speech. By your logic, these should have already devolved into tools of domestic political persecution. Have they?
Yes. YES. The FARA has sometimes been applied asymmetrically, especially against individuals or organizations connected to political opponents, lobbyists and think tanks. It is the perfect example for what I mean. The FARA is broadly defined and with a DOJ under an administration, it is prone to misuse. The DOJ under Trump considered to use it to charge Hunter Biden. The identification of "hostile agents" that you argue is necessary is exactly what I mean when I point to government misuse, as the Trump admin is currently using these exact laws to identify activists and nonprofits as domestic terrorists [1]. We have people in this thread decry the Trump administration for their actions and stances on selectively applying free speech while they at the same time argue for more government power even while it is being abused in this very moment. I am aghast at how this is happening.
> Another issue that I have with your argument is that you've identified risks of action but proposed nothing. What's your actual framework here? If coordinated foreign information warfare is real and harmful, and ongoing (which you acknowledge) what should democracies do?
Do what democracy's are already doing. Issue sanctions that hurt. A large amount of LNG and gas imports in Europe are still traceable to Russia. Invest into digital thinking and digital literacy. But that would require putting your money where your mouth is, instead of arguing for those sweet tools of citizen control. Germany spends below average on education and our pupils suffer. The same is true for US education.
Sorry, but I won't argue for controlling a stupid populace when we fail at teaching at the same time. I will give you an example. The censorship tools already exist, at least in Germany, and they are justified and enacted by politicians that cite "studies" from NGOs like Amadeu Antonio, HateAid, Demokratie leben! or NETTZ. All organizations that receive massive funds from the govt that exist only to deliver "proof" and "reasons" for censorship because of "hate" and "misinformation". Of course, these studies [2] are then cited massively [3] by the media aparatus and ultimately the same politicians that paid to have this information produced [4]. Sometime after, the truth may be reveiled [5], the falsified data exposed, but the damage is done and laws are proposed [6] that enable the government to break and enter into journalist offices and media companies and shutting them down without a court order. All in the name of fighting misinformation and saving democracy.
Sanctions haven't stopped Russian influence operations, they've continued under the heaviest sanctions regime in history.
I agree that digital literacy is genuinely important, but lets not kid ourselves that we can suddenly make it work tomorrow, it's basically a generational project. Meanwhile, influence operations are happening now, at scale, with measurable effects. So what I mean is that "invest in education" approach is correct but insufficient as a response to an active, ongoing campaign. It's like responding to a house fire by saying we should invest in fire safety education. Your home will burn down while you do this.
So I understand your point but you're essentially arguing that because democracies can abuse power, they should unilaterally disarm against adversaries who face no such constraints. Russia etc have no free speech concerns limiting their operations against us. Doing nothing will allow these adveraries to destroy our democracies from within.That is an endgame of your approach, and I just can't agree with this.
So doing nothing because our tools might be misused feels like it guarantees we lose.
I think we can at least agree that the choice isn't only between "government ministry of truth" and "do nothing" and we need a middle ground solution. Transparency requirements (forcing platforms to label state affiliated accounts), requiring disclosure of foreign funding for political ads and influencers, holding platforms accountable for coordinated inauthentic behavior etc etc, these don't require the government to decide what's true. They require disclosure of who is speaking and who is paying. Think of the US influencers paid unknowingly by Russia, or the "patriotic" X accounts that turned out to be foreign run. Those are just the obvious cases already happening. This needs to stop or at least the public needs clear disclosure of funding and origin.
We have homomorphic encryption now. Let's use it in a way that protects privacy but still helps flag foreign influence and helps distinguish between foreign speech and protected domestic speech.
Ha! What sanctions? We are not sanctioning like we truly mean it.
> So I understand your point but you're essentially arguing that because democracies can abuse power,
No, my point is that because democracies are abusing power, right now, we should be against giving them more tools. The US democracy is in an active state of being dismantled because they have lots of shiny legal tools to do it. These very same beginnings can be seen in Europe too, when the EU tries again and again to pass privacy invading internet tracking laws. We are not in favour of Iran building nukes for "defense", and I would wager you won't defend their efforts in the face of critics when they say "hey, we're pretty sure they will abuse it" because it might not happen, even though abuse is clearly already happening.
> Russia etc have no free speech concerns limiting their operations against us. Doing nothing will allow these adveraries to destroy our democracies from within
If democracy is so weak that it needs to be protected from uncomfortable truths and the opinions of its people (read: opinions you or I may not share), then maybe it's not saveable.
> I think we can at least agree that the choice isn't only between "government ministry of truth" and "do nothing" and we need a middle ground solution.
Dead on. The only true weapon to combat misinformation is transparency. But transparency efforts are not what I'm seeing, and they are certainly not what Ursula von der Leyen means when she talks about the Digital Services Act.
I don't think transparency alone will be enough. We may need to treat foreign speech differently from domestic speech (my last sentence from previous comment), with different protections (prioritizing domestic speech) because you simply cannot control the firehose of propaganda coming from the rest of the world. And don't get me wrong, this isn't about silencing foreign opinions. What I mean is we need to recognize that a citizen expressing a view and a state apparatus manufacturing thousands of fake citizens expressing that view are fundamentally different things, deserving different treatment. We already make this distinction in campaign finance, lobbying, broadcasting etc. So I think extending it to the information space isn't a radical departure, it's basically catching up to the modern world.
I want to circle back to something, because I think there's an irony in your argument that's worth examining.
The administration you're worried about abusing power is itself a product of the influence operations. We have documented evidence (not speculation) of Russian operations boosting Trump's candidacy in 2016 and 2024. We have confirmed payments to influencers like Tim Pool and others through Tenet Media, amplification networks on social platforms, coordinated campaigns targeting swing state voters. The Mueller investigation, the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the recent DOJ indictments etc all showing the same thing.
So when you say "look at how Trump is abusing power, this is why we shouldn't give governments these tools", I'd ask: how do you think he got there? The foreign influence you're arguing we should mostly tolerate helped install the government you're now citing as proof we can't trust government.
You're using the consequences of the problem as an argument against addressing the problem.
On your "if democracy can't survive this, maybe it's not saveable" point, I find this fatalistic in a way that doesn't match how you argue about everything else. You clearly do think democracy is worth protecting (that's why you're worried about government overreach, civil liberties etc) So I think yu're not a nihilist.
So why adopt an all or nothing frame specifically here? Democracies have always required defensive mechanisms. We have treason laws, foreign agent registration, campaign finance rules etc. So it wasn't about "pure openness vs. authoritarianism", but basically it always been about where to draw lines. Drawing them poorly is a risk. But as I said before refusing to draw them at all isn't principled neutrality, it's just losing by default.
I may have missed something but Akamai seem to be living proof that it's possible to operate that kind of business at scale from the US without vice signalling or publicly sucking up to fascist authoritarians.
The good players are the US on this front. I say this as a European. Europe at large is in a dark place in terms of freedom of speech, the press, and other issues like immigration. And the US might eventually have to be the ones to apply force to hold our leaders accountable, ironic as that is given history.
Don't be fooled. People like Elon aren't pro-free speech. They only want their speech. For example on Elon's X you can call people all kinds of things but calling someone "CIS gendered" is a ban-able offense [1]. Linking to other platforms was also forbidden for a while and in the H1B discussion X shadow banned a bunch of people [2] and I could go on for a while.
CF is a US company, the EU has the right to make their own - misguided - laws. And CF has the option to simply stop doing business with Italy, or comply with the law. This stupid grandstanding is just a thinly veiled attempt at blackmail which I'm sure will very much impress the legislators and the judges of the country to which it is addressed. /s
I'm a team lead in an American organization that relies heavily on Cloudflare's Project Galileo[1], and I read that post with growing dread. My first thought was that this guy doesn't sound very much like a CEO. Let me rephrase that: He sounds like the kind of unhinged CEO of orgs I try to stay away from (X, for instance).
Then I read what you're talking about:
> [...] we are considering the following actions: [...] 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; [...]
That's punishing all of Italy's users including those whose job it is to call truth to power (Project Galileo is free for journalists). If my state had a similar spat with Cloudflare would we be in danger of losing the infrastructure we've grown to depend on?
I was complacent and we need to re-think our relationship with them. It's true what they say: there's no such thing as a free lunch.
He has a point about why they would they offer a country services, when the country fines them more than their entire revenue in the said jurisdiction.
I agree, and I'm really split about a lot of this, because screw this ~blackmail~ extortion AGCOM was trying to pull. The only thing I'd say is that a country is more than a department, and these actions will hurt others who had no influence on AGCOM's decisions far more than it'll hurt AGCOM directly. Maybe it will create pressure against AGCOM and force them to back down.
But as a middle manager of a small nonprofit who makes decisions for my org's web infrastructure I have to make sure our organization's infra doesn't become part of a bargaining chip in a future conflict between a giant company and our government.
The act of threatening unrelated customers just because they are in the same country is extremely stupid.
Businesses might not care whether he tweets at JD Vance or Taylor Swift, but the risk of having your website shut down because the CEO of your firewall vendor has a psychological breakdown on Twitter is unacceptable.
It is Friday evening in Europe and the fact that Cloudflare leadership and Cloudflare legal team couldn't put out a statement to mitigate this situation within the last 5 hours shows that this guys could run the company into the ground within blink of an eye.
Remember, some weeks ago Cloudflare had an outage because of an extremely stupid engineering mishap, today it is an extremely stupid leadership mishap. How many more strikes should they be granted?
Cloudflare has very limited leverage here. Punishing the entire country for the actions of their elected government in hope of protest is about as good as they can do other than hoping Trump does something crazy. Every italian citizen has some say over their governments actions, even if they dont support them.
When you fine a company more than the entire revenue they get from your nation, they will pull out. It is not retributive. What is hard to understand about that?
> If my state had a similar spat with Cloudflare would we be in danger of losing the infrastructure we've grown to depend on?
Absolutely. And if any of their competitors claims they can guarantee that they won't ever (have to) pull out somewhere for political reasons, they're lying or ignorant. You cannot escape politics. One election or new law can redraw the landscape overnight.
Also I doubt you "depend" on any single SaaS product where you're completely at the mercy of another company. There's probably nothing that you couldn't swap out in a pinch.
Exactly, I can't believe the braindead takes being spouted on this thread. Is HN really filled with people that can't think critically the second they leave their terminal?
It is not unrealistic at all. The Olympics are run by politicians, essentially, since they appoint the committees, make the investments, build the infrastructure.
And the ones pushing for these bans are the sport media tycoons: this fight isn't about Anna's Archive, it is about people watching soccer illegally. Because that is where the real money is.
Yeah correct. I hate this so much in this topic. I hate the disrespect for the law in this topic here but he is right here. The Olympics, soccer and all the other sports (but also other billionaires businesses) have to be put back in their place. How is FIFA able to prevent me from drinking my favourite beer in the city center of my favourite town just because world cup is on town.
Another legitimate complaint is how much police force is deployed each week in and around stadiums. The public pays the costs for security, big soccer gets the profits.
> Not a good look on that guy to list his "pro-bono" services and threaten to pull them while asking JD Vance for his help.
I think it's worth noting the quotes around the pro-bono. As outlined by Matthew Prince (Co-founder & CEO, CloudFlare):
> Bandwidth Chicken & Egg: in order to get the unit economics around bandwidth to offer competitive pricing at acceptable margins you need to have scale, but in order to get scale from paying users you need competitive pricing. Free customers early on helped us solve this chicken & egg problem. Today we continue to see that benefit in regions where our diversity of customers helps convince regional telecoms to peer with us locally, continuing to drive down our unit costs of bandwidth.
> It is not charity but a business decision that benefits them.
Of course it benefits them, it's a private enterprise, not a local government providing trash service.
No one also can force them to provide such a service, try to control their global operations which is outside of Italy's jurisdiction, and if they're not making any more they can pack their stuff and leave.
The panel is backed by a law. Respect the law. Italy has a judicial system and in cases like this, probably some EU court could be also called. US politicians can reach out to EU/Italian politics to harmonize trade... But wait, do not we kill trade deals. They are so unfair (aka. compromises)
> We can’t offer free services in a country that fines us millions unreasonably. Fix your government or lose access to our charity.
On one hand, I agree with you, it's problematic to threaten collective punishment. However, I don't think it's unreasonable to "divest" from a country trying to fine you for behavior outside of said country. It's also important to communicate that clearly, and unfortunately bluntly. Did you have a different expectation or suggestion for what they should do?
I think it is a big strategic mistake for him to personally take ownership of this topic and to elevate it on a political level. He openly aligned himself with two people who are extremely unpopular in Europe, while threatening an important EU member state.
I think his hubris makes him overestimate Cloudflare's importance for Europe. Cloudflare is simply not important enough. If it was Microsoft or Apple threatening, then maybe - but those companies are clever enough to leverage lobbying for this.
Now the Cloudflare CEO has set himself up to be at the whims of JD Vance/Trump, while providing a perfect "arrogant US tech company" scapegoat that can be slaugthered by European politics and the media conglomerate that he is threatening.
Europe is too important for USA. I don't think the US administration will like the relationship to go sour at this very point in time just because of this Cloudflare doofus barking around.
Anyways, it is like Facebook CEO and Amazon CEO applauding the Trump inauguration; it is a totally unnecessary political statement which fragments their userbase and introduces a political dimension to any procurement decision involving Cloudflare. It takes people's illusion that Cloudflare is a neutral tech company and replaces it with this guy's twitter ramblings, who is obviously an Elon Musk and JD Vance fanboy.
> it is a totally unnecessary political statement which fragments their userbase and introduces a political dimension to any procurement decision involving Cloudflare.
My take was, If you need help from the current State Department, or the current administration, (and I assume they do) it absolutely is a necessary statement. And then, this is them trying very hard to suck up, as is required, without pissing off everyone.
Perhaps I'm wrong, and this is actually a form of honesty, instead of performative theater. In which case I would probably agree with you. It's unfortunate. But I default to the assumption that people aren't children by choice.
He took a risk in ignoring a law instead of exiting the market. They did not escalate, they applied the law.
What we need is an international legal framework for the Internet. And that includes compromises on all sides. China, EU, Russia, US and others have very different understanding on what is right. But hey, I think US politics is America first and cancel all international treaties. Sounds like more problems like this are incoming.
> Europe is too important for USA. I don't think the US administration will like the relationship to go sour at this very point in time just because of this Cloudflare doofus barking around.
When you say "for USA", what do you mean by "USA"?
Are you talking about the general US population? US corporations? Or the person who decides foreign policy direction (i.e., Trump)?
Because Trump recently ordered the snatching of a foreign head of state because he didn't like how the guy danced and allegedly didn't take him seriously.
I was trying to say that even though the US administration is actively escalating with Europe, I don't think the point in time has been reached where they want to go full berserk and cut Europe off from services by US tech companies. Cloudflare CEO tries to trigger such an escalation right now, but I'm not sure the US administration wants this kind of escalation right now, because it would also accelerate migration away from Microsoft and other US tech companies, hurting their revenue. For FAANG $7M is peanuts, and they won't leave billions on the table just because Cloudflare CEO has a big ego.
Was with him in the first part, then wtf. Vance and the others dont stand for free speech either, it's only their own speech that matters and they'll proudly ban anything else.
I think maybe I should seek out AI art for awhile. I know this is where everything is going and I'm tired of cringing so hard every time one of these AI gen'd images is used in a serious way. But that image at the bottom of the tweet makes the entire post seem less serious to me.
Yes I thought the same. I thought the post was making a good point, but the image just undermined the seriousness of the post, as it characterized Italian politicians as zombies. It made me think less of the author.
Rejecting the system, everyone in it, and everyone that's willing to interact with it, is not a way to get good outcomes. No don't "just take it" but encouraging one of the good opinions of the vice president is fine.
I disagree, some systems are so bad they need to be rejected outright. As a European, I find asking for the help of Vance and Musk as hostile, even if the person asking is in the right.
He is not asking Vance for help as an individual but the position he has for the country the company is headquartered in. What would you expect? They cant go and ask a random country for help on a complicated geopolitical issue. You are supposed (maybe required) to contact officials from your country and relevant agencies and institutions.
I'm not the biggest fan of the US Administration currently either but if a company asks them for help, they're doing what you're supposed to do, and they shouldn't be labeled as bad or sharing the view of the current administration.
At the very least don't complain about it publicly. Using diplomatic channels I think things like this can quietly go away.
But if you make it an issue in the public court of opinion people usually support their own democratically elected government compared to the increasingly hostile foreign regime.
There are legal avenues in any jurisdiction to contest decisions that you believe are unfair. Running to the (vice-)president and your oligarch friends is just weak and makes you look like the bully.
Hm, I'm trying to keep an open mind here so help me:
Why exactly would that be weak? Given the resources and connections it needs, wouldn't it be actually very strong? Also, I'm from EU, and nobody in their right mind sees Italy as the victim. The politics in Italy gave gone insane and they are a huge example of a fuck up as a whole country. Also the EU, is trying to push censorship law and most companies in EU are fight with everyone they've got to not let them pass and organize petitions and what not.
Also are you all people supporting this law and the fine or do people, for some weird reason, have started to hate Cloudflare and letting their emotions cloud their judgement? Lets forget Cloudflare for a moment and imagine just another company... Would you still agree entirely on this laws contents and the procedures and fines issued? Lets please all focus on the important topic here. Companies come and go, but destructive laws keep us suffering for decades on end, maybe forever.
You are right. But there is a point here that international harmonization and compromise is a solution here. Which is not exactly a strength of an America First policy.
His tone and sucking up to his authoritarian government will probably only serve to negatively polarize Europe against Cloudflare, even if he might have a point of the substance itself.
Cloudflare CEO threatens to pull out of Italy and to stop offering free "cybersecurity" to its residents
Would this mean Italian websites would be free from Cloudflare "bot protection" or whatever marketing name is used for those annoying "Checking your internet connection..." interstitials
HN does not use a "Just one moment..." Cloudlfare interstitial
It seems to do just fine without it
HN does not require Javascript or use of a particular client to request and read its HTML. I use an HTML reader (offline) with no suupport for auto-loading resources, images, JS, CSS or DNS "prefetch" nonsense
The Cloudflare "protection" against so-called "abuse" forces www users to enable Javascript and use a client that exposes them to increased risks, including risks to their privacy and quiet enjoyment of the web
It cannot tell the difference between (a) a single reguest from a single IP address by a www user who prefers a client that is not distributed by an online advertising company or an online advertising company's business partner and (b) so-called "abuse" such as an excessive number of requests, sometimes from many IP addresses
For the purposes of "protection", it considers (a) and (b) the same
CF's "solution" is to force the www user to choose a particular client that puts the www user at risk and exposes them to surveillance and advertising, and surreptitious data collection
"Solve" a problem by creating a new, additional problem
One thing it should mean is that anyone using Cloudflare is doing so while risking that its CEO suddenly pulls the rug and closes down the service; not a dependency you want in your stack, and not a great look for a service that's supposed to be usable as a stable high-availability one.
The alternative to the "checking your internet connection" page for many websites is either "508 Resource Limit Is Reached", "Please click all the boxes with traffic lights", or no website at all. They're not there to bully you, they're there to protect websites from abuse.
I agree with the CEO, while also feeling a bit nauseous at the MAGA Musk suck-up at the end - I suppose this is the game you have to play with this current administration.
Yeah, it's weird. I don't like the law in Italy, Cloudflare, or the current US administration, but I'm fairly anti-censorship, so I feel compelled to side with Cloudflare unless more info comes to light.
It really doesn’t matter what administration is in charge, at a certain level you have to curry favor with whatever administration is in power and hold your true motives close to your chest. People seem to think what people say in public is perfect knowledge of their true intentions. No. What they say is what they want someone to hear them say. There is nothing to gain by saying what you really feel, no one can prove it’s what you really feel anyway.
Plenty of activists on the other side of the spectrum note of "greenwashing" and "pinkwashing", nice words about the environment or LGBT+ rights without any noticeable action beyond adding a temporary pride badge to social media accounts in pride month or a picture of a wind turbine on their website.
This is great news! Who would have expected Cloudflare to truly contribute to EU digital sovereignty.
On a more serious note, I'm surprised Cloudflare wants to pull out of Italy. Being a company which terminates TLS connections for Italy must be a gold mine for the NSA.
Cloudflare and other US tech companies base business decisions on revenue (and apparently on emotion), not allegiance to government agencies that have fallen out of fashion.
Yes, it is good for Europe that US tech leadership comes out in the open and share their twitter ramblings, so nobody can deny that their interests are not aligned with us.
The appeal to an open internet from Cloudflare to Elon and Peter Thiel's stuffed toy is evidence this is not about freedom of speech but a political game. The AGCOM requests are inane and the so-called "Piracy Shield" sponsored by sports team corporations currently eyeing VPNs needs to go and those responsible for it must pay, but this doesn't make this right, either. And the current USA "cabal" isn't shadowy, rather right up your face, mocking you every day.
> The fact he's posting on X to begin with is a warning in itself.
Why so? The counter at the bottom of the post claims that it has been viewed 7.5 million times. I don't know how this translates into individual people; but still, probably a decent reach?
People are there for reach. Politicians, celebrities. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer, Kaja Kallas, Ursula von der Leyen... If they don't see a problem, why should the Cloudflare CEO?
So blocking Kiwifarms took.. months of activism and loud complaining. Heraled by Matthew as "this is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare's role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with".
However a fine that amounts to ~0.7% of the annual revenue and they threaten to block an entire country?
Actually, the fine amounts to over 200% of Italy-sourced revenue ($17 million fine vs. $8 million in revenue in 2024). Why would you continue doing business in Italy?
They are a conglomerate and per Matthews words "an internet infrastructure provider". Why does the local revenue matter when they are serving a global market?
EDIT: And fwiw, "Why would you continue doing business in Italy?" is not what is being proposed. They are threatening to block 55 million people from ~20% of the world wide web.
They're threatening to remove servers from Italy. They're explicitly NOT threatening to block Italians from being able to access sites through Cloudflare.
I have my fair share of problems with CF, but I assume here that they're threatening higher latency (i.e. requests from Italian users would have to go to a neighboring country to be routed) rather than blocking.
How freaking expensive do you think infrastructure is? It's not that expensive, and certainly not anywhere close to the point where it would make a noticeable impact on GDP.
> EDIT: And fwiw, "Why would you continue doing business in Italy?" is not what is being proposed. They are threatening to block 55 million people from ~20% of the world wide web.
There is no mention of blocking people in Italy from using sites protected by Cloudflare. From the tweet:
> we are considering the following actions: 1) discontinuing the millions of dollars in pro bono cyber security services we are providing the upcoming Milano-Cortina Olympics; 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; 3) removing all servers from Italian cities; and 4) terminating all plans to build an Italian Cloudflare office or make any investments in the country.
If they do not want to comply with introducing censorship, then withdrawing from Italy is the only other option.
Italian citizens and residents are unfortunately collateral damage.
It absolutely is. Why should people receive a free service while their democratically elected officials enact laws that enable them to target global revenue in their fines?
What else could they do? The government represent the country. If their business model is not welcome there then they withdraw. It's very fair to say "if you insist on those rules I choose not to play". They owe Italy nothing.
Btw, I recently "threatened" Switzerland to withdraw my business from there because the cost of doing business there (complying with their VAT regulation) is higher than my revenue from there (maybe 1-2 licenses a year). The whole Switzerland will not be able to buy my software because of that. I didn't think of posting about it on Twitter though.
> What else could they do? The government represent the country. If their business model is not welcome there then they withdraw. It's very fair to say "if you insist on those rules I choose not to play".
They can just not threaten the population of Italy? They are a 2 billion dollar company that has apparently scheduled a meeting with the vice president of the US on short notice? This is going to be resolved politically.
> Btw, I recently "threatened" Switzerland to withdraw my business from there because the cost of doing business there (complying with their VAT regulation) is higher than my revenue from there (maybe 1-2 licenses a year). The whole Switzerland will not be able to buy my software because of that. I didn't think of posting about it on Twitter though.
You have not given "free services" to 20% of the world wide web that you are now using as leverage.
Politic is not separate from the population though. Pressure from the population (hopefully) sways political decisions. This is why google news pulling out of countries were public.
He isn't threatening to block Italy, just to remove cloudflare's business from there. Anyone living and surfing from Italy would not be blocked by cloudflare from accessing any service provided by cloudflare.
Yeah that makes sense to me. If you come up to me and say “you have to arrest that guy; he’s stealing from me” I have to do a lot of research to make sure that everything is correct.
On the other hand, if I see you steal from me, I don’t have to do a lot of research. I am a first party to the thing. I can be sure.
It’s the difference between a policeman arriving on the scene of an assault and someone actually assaulting the policeman.
The acting party being the affected party simplifies things because you know you’re not a “confused deputy”.
> So blocking Kiwifarms took.. months of activism and loud complaining.
Kiwifarms isn't a pirate site. It's just another site that you think is legitimate to censor.
> However a fine that amounts to ~0.7% of the annual revenue and they threaten to block an entire country?
What's going to be next weeks fine? Of course they should block the entire country. Even if they pay the fine (I could imagine there's some way that the EU could force that on pain of forcing them out of Europe), they should block the country.
I'm not sure why would you want to remind the world about that episode. those men lied, stalked, harassed, and threatened a lot of people to get that perfectly legal website exposed to very illegal DDoS attacks.
Matthew Prince’s framing of Italy’s action as a “free speech assault by a shadowy cabal” is rhetorically exaggerated, but his underlying concerns about due process have legitimate basis—confirmed by EU Commission criticism of the same system.
The reality is more nuanced than either party presents: Italy is enforcing an aggressive copyright protection regime with documented implementation flaws, while Prince is strategically reframing an anti-piracy dispute as a censorship issue and overstating US administration support for his position.
The americans get here a dose of their own medicine. An IT related law with global reach. One of the first of this kind was actually created by the US itself with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Now they complain that other countries do the same to them. Somehow I can't feel sorry for them.
I read the tweet twice and I don’t see any mention of free speech. What he’s describing, when you look past the rhetoric, sounds ridiculous: a single medium sized country is demanding power to institute global blocks of content on the internet? If that’s an accurate description, that’s deeply concerning for the long term viability of the internet.
"While there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration" and "in this case @ElonMusk is right" are not how you talk about beacons.
I cannot believe this is the first time that Cloudflare has been confronted by a local government which asked to perform "global" filtering of content. It is clear for anyone who has worked with bureaucrats that their "global" means "within our jurisdiction". It is extremely weird that he feels emboldened to publicly lash out like this and pull in people who are extremely unpopular in Europe.
You keep saying this, but 'global' has never meant 'in my jurisdiction' in any conversation or document I've ever read. What additional information can you provide the confirms your interpretation is correct?
He actually praised Vance role as a defender of democratic values, but Vance is known to deny Greenlands souvereignity, ready to capitulate to a russian dictator, indifference to police killing a protester recently, etc.
His idea of free speech does not include critical reporting. The wider US government is trying to shut down the BBC with a lawsuit or has public officials threaten individual journalists to their face, basically nothing is too large or too small.
> He actually praised Vance role as a defender of democratic values, but Vance is known to deny Greenlands souvereignity, ready to capitulate to a russian dictator, indifference to police killing a protester recently, etc.
Horrible stuff. I agree. His statement about free speech in the EU, when removed from him as a person, is still true. Progressive media sources agree [1]. If both aisles, as well as European free speech activists, think something is going horribly wrong in Europe, we should listen.
Oof, Cloudflare has been one of the most interesting tech companies for me, and one I would have worked for in a heartbeat. But the MAGA pandering in this tweet is quite disappointing. I get it, running a large business in the US these days requires a certain amount of bootlicking, but still. And I say this while generally agreeing with Matthew's stance.
The "haters" who long ago have warned about the risk of Cloudflare MITM'ing global website traffic have been proven right. In the end, Cloudflare is another mass surveillance tool next to Meta/Google/Apple which will be weaponized in the interests of the current US administration.
I hope people go take a look at previous statements by MP/JGC (to be fair, no longer affiliated) with this in mind - I have always found them to be just as degrading and whiny as this announcement reads.
In Spain the LaLiga CEO, Tebas (Soccer association, they are legally fighting against Cloudflare and doing MITM's everwhere) isn't very different in that case (Francoist far right supporter).
Every time any of these CEOs see even the mildest of pushback, the mask just fully falls off and you see them immediately run to the worst people on the planet.
I feel for his chief legal counsel who must be crying in their office right now. In the US, courts have been deactivated for MAGA-aligned rich people, but Cloudflare CEO is so stupid to assume that the same has happened in Italy. The arrogance and ignorance is astounding.
Nobody gets to these positions unless they're a complete sociopath who've long lost touch with reality. Just listen to anything thiel, musk, altman, vance and other degenerates have to say, some animals display more humanity than these golems
This follows 23—again, 23—violations reported to Cloudflare. There is nothing more to add. Given how slowly Italian law typically moves, Cloudflare had more than enough time to take corrective action. The tone would likely have been far more accommodating had Cloudflare attempted to contact the authorities and negotiate its position. Instead, it appears that, in all likelihood, nothing was done after 23 violations. What exactly was the CEO expecting?
We don't know what the law is. The rules were created with an administrative procedure backed by a very generic statute which is likely unconstitutional. Neither the Supreme court (Cassazione) nor the Constitutional court have ruled on the matter yet.
Getting a fine is the first step towards further judicial review, probably.
And he is more than welcome to do so. The services provided by Cloudflare can easily be replaced by more local providers that have no problem complying with Italian laws. The takedown might not happen within 30 minutes, but there would still be action and a response to a report from the authorities. Italy and Europe do not need the arrogance of those who believe they are above the law by virtue of a freedom that is used only as an ideological shield. As if Trump were really the champion of freedom, right?
Is this, like in Spain and some other countries, all basically focused on blocking illegal sports streaming? Especially soccer. I have a friend who runs a fairly large forum (aka a lot of user content including links to illegal things) in Spain who gets letters about 'Illegal streaming links to movies, TV shows and sports' with a list of links; he knows he only has to remove the sports, they do not give a crap about illegal US show streams locally and US requests go to /dev/null as they cannot enforce anyway. So I assume this is only about streaming sports as well?
It's all a racket to extract money from Italians, not enforcing IP rights.
Just like it's mentioned in Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu, some organizations are designed to extract resources from masses. Italian loves soccer and some big shots managed to get the TV rights for a per-pay service, and that's why they're pushing for so hard. Otherwise I don't think Italian courts would go after people selling pirated DVDs on the streets of Milan.
note that this is all about football streaming, which is so funny
as far as i can tell, it's really not about politics or surveillance... it's really just about football streaming, and they push the 30 minute thing because it's important for them to stop it during the match.
it's stupid; but it's even more stupid to do draconian censorship for... football streaming.
Not sure you can call it censorship if it's the author of the book who doesn't want you to access it for free. I know there are a few levels of indirection here, but with a few notable exceptions authors are normally against their books being pirated.
I personally sure want Anna's Archive staying up, but comparing it to nazis burning books is a bit too much IMO
This isn't banning books, it's akin to banning a book store. If a book store chain isn't paying their taxes and gets shut down, the books have not been banned or censored.
Back in the day it was US media companies which started the big war against piracy and for the use of DRM. It was pushed by US media companies and the US government upon Europe. Same as with software patents. It's weird that now US companies complain about local media rights holders doing their censorship thing when the whole thing was started by the US.
Most large scam groups now have their own ASNs and IP registrations, so CF just forwards them the report and tells you to contact fiberscam.co.za or whatever fake company the scam group has created. They are not cut out for this workaround and yet the largest scam groups have been using it since 2023.
I don't think they are currently doing any statistical analysis, one provider has just 3 /24s and hosts thousands of scam shops, hundreds of reports to CF and nothing done, they won't consider blocking the ASNs even when you show them a report that 98% of the IPs they own serve scam shops.
"In its memoirs, Cloudflare also states that its services: “do not give rise to the transmission of content on the websites of service users; [...] do not allow Cloudflare to know, control, or modify in any way the content of the websites, which always remains available on a third-party web server regardless of its services.”"
:)))
> In addition, we are considering the following actions: > ... > discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users
does he not understand that countries are...countries? "quasi-judicial" is so childish of a thing to say, of all people by a CEO.
I don't even care about the details of the law, what is he aiming to achieve here by disrespecting their government as a foreigner and accusing them of "censorship". Makes wish they'd fine him just for that tweet alone. You do what a country tells you to do as a foreigner, or you leave.
These people want immigrants in their own country who obey their own laws to be treated like animals and deported to countries they've never even heard of before, yet they don't think they're obliged to follow the laws of other countries.
> You do what a country tells you to do as a foreigner, or you leave.
I suppose you're right. You're still allowed to criticize the government's decisions though! This is certainly true in Italy, which has quite reasonable laws with regards to freedom of speech.
> what is he aiming to achieve here by disrespecting their government
Western government instituitions are hardly sacred. Again, people are allowed to criticize them, or disrespect them event if they so desire. What he's trying to achieve is a more just and reasonable application of the law, as it's quite clear if you'll care to carefully read the tweet instead of raging at his supposed disrespect for the Italian government.
The people in italy are allowed to do whatever they want with their own government. Even foreigners in other countries, who cares. But if you're a guest, you don't disrespect your host, certainly not about the rules they have.
Imagine if I were to complain about HN rules and how the moderators are tyrants. That's what @eastdakota is doing. It's one thing to say that when you're posting else where, but not here. he's not having to following italian laws because he's an italian, he's having to do so, so that he can be afforded the privileges of doing business there.
I should probably make sure my usage of Cloudflare is ready to be migrated off at a moments notice if it's this easy for Cloudflare to consider getting rid of it for a whole country. Funny enough, after a month in Italy and using my tailscale node at home out of habit, most online services assumed my home IP wanted the Italian version of every website (including Cloudflare). I wonder if that would have also included blocking me from access (if this ends up going through).
> BTW, before I read this Xweet I was a Cloudflare fan.
The CEO of a US tech company asking the Vice President for help with censorship caused you to immediately flip you opinion? And not only flip your opinion, but practically embrace complete censorship of the internet if that means Cloudflare leaving Europe?
One must be thankful to him for removing the illusion that Cloudflare is some benevolent, neutral US company fighting for a more secure internet.
My risk acceptance is not big enough to have all Cloudflare-secured websites in my country to go offline just because someone from my country has a Twitter fight with a member of the US administration or with the Cloudflare leadership.
It was necessary to get them to take action. The only thing the current administration cares about is public image so publicly fellating them is what you need to do to get them to go to bat on your behalf.
He runs a private company, not a government institution and I'm sure they can pay a lawyer to sue the Italian entity if it displeases him so much. Like everybody else would.
I want just to step in by telling that Cloudflare also has networks in China. Probably not the best company to talk about freedom of speech when they collaborate with these goverments actively...
If american corps do not want to play according to European rules: go ahead, just stop doing business in Europe. Europe will be fine! Understand that there are other things than the US‘s commercial interests even though it seems ATM that’s everything the US is: commercial interests. On the east, on the west: Wake up!
Doing business is different in the EU as it is different in China or Russia. If you want it to be not different, work in globalization not America first.
Europe was fine until it got disrupted by Russia and the US. But that has nothing to do with this topic here. This is just a company not following a local law. Nothing special in the law (it is shitty like any IP law) or the case here.
How is it a bad thing to have cloudflare out of your country? No single entity should have the power to do this kind of thing even if they choose not to. Don't threaten italy with a good time
Related: EU commission has also criticized AGCOM for Privacy Shield [0].
> The Commission would also like to emphasize that the effective tackling of illegal content must also take into due account the fundamental right to freedom of expression and information under the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU
I'm not sure I have ever seen such an unprofessional communication from the CEO of Cloudflare, irrespective of a poorly written Italian law.
The fine was also peanuts for a company the size of Cloudflare.
Given the current political climate I think the tone he is using will turn a lot of Europeans off: Open threats against citizens of an EU country (turning off free cyber protections) and general 'American Exceptionalism' attitude and brown nosing of the current administration.
He is within his rights to pull out of a market, but this is an example of the now-becoming-classic Trumpism of smugly shouting pretty extreme open threats to bully your way into getting what you want (and screw everyone else who isn't America).
It honestly makes me want to add it to the list of American tech companies willing to sabotage Europe for disproportionate reasons. (Currently X, Microsoft) and start planning strategies to decouple from them, if not outright replace.
Perhaps this is a knee-jerk reaction, but I was not expecting this from Cloudflare.
the fine being 2x revenue from italy is not peanuts. The threat to leave the country is more than fair. If we are talking about sabotaging europe we should focus in the first place on chat control laws and how those slowly slip into adoption...
> Perhaps this is a knee-jerk reaction, but I was not expecting this from Cloudflare.
You’re surprised that an American CEO is speaking out against a large fine many believe is bogus, instead of not saying anything to avoid offending…Europe? I don’t think anyone in the world right now is intimidated by the EU, from China to the US to Russia.
I'm Italian, and as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist, I find hard to empathize with Cloudflare, especially after this tweet.
First off, the immediate appeal to Vance and Musk is embarrassing. I believe he knows he's technically in the wrong for not abiding to the law, so gathering the sympathy of the "freedom fighters" of the web is all he can do. But the funniest part about this tweet are the "threats" he makes towards Italy.
> In addition, we are considering the following actions:
> ...
> discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users
He phrases it to be as if the free tier is a favor Cloudflare does to the world, as if it's not obviously a loss-leader designed to get more people into the Cloudflare ecosystem.
> Removing all servers from Italian cities
This is my favorite by far. Does he think that this will start a popular uprising? My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.
In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand. I hope this ends up as being a push for independent European cloud.
> He phrases it to be as if the free tier is a favor Cloudflare does to the world, as if it's not obviously a loss-leader designed to get more people into the Cloudflare ecosystem.
It can be both. I run many open source websites behind cloudflare.
It's the same as github. All the free hosting and free CIs and free issues/discussion forums, and free code review for open source repos (90% of all open source projects?) happens to be a a loss leader as well.
Both are still a huge free contribution to the world. They don't have to do it. They could just have zero free anything.
What market share would they have without offering the free tier?
Much lower than what they have now, and that would make for a more decentralised and resilient internet
> and that would make for a more decentralised and resilient internet
The only people that say that haven't run a site on the open internet in the last decade plus. It's such an ignorant takes it's hard to take anything you say seriously.
I’m not advocating for having no protections at all. Without Cloudflare giving away protection for free it’s entirely possible that we would have multiple smaller provider offering protection at a fair price so maybe only a smaller fraction of the internet goes offline next time Cloudflare pushes a bad configuration
Im sorry but your epistemics are very wrong. Providing a free service with no strings attached to nearly every website in the world adds a ton of value, possibly more than Cloudflare’s market cap. And the fact that a free product can lead to profits, when other companies make the choice to pay more, does not remove that worldly contribution.
Another italian here; while this whole situation is bad and piracy shield is definitely not the solution, having the cloudflare CEO that threatens to remove free-tier service makes me wonder. They offer a free pill, just to be the "powerful" guys that threaten people when they are paying some million euros.
Well done my friend. :-) I'm already moving websites off cloudflare. bye!
P.S: I believe piracy shield is a s*t idea naturally.
Cloudflare is clearly in the right. Global censorship from an unaccountable cabal is a moral wrong. There's no sense in which Italy somehow 'wins' here, because even if they win, they lose.
Presumably AGCOM are accountable to the Italian government and therefore ultimately the Italian people. Or do you just mean 'unaccountable' in the sense that Americans should be able to do whatever they please, wherever they please, and they don't appreciate being hindered by trivial things like other country's laws.
I am very pro-piracy, but calling to Trumpist elite reads like he thinks that European instututions have no right to censor Internet, because they are European, while controlling the Internet is an exlusive American right.
I really think Europe should adopt a Chinese approach to copyright, but I don't expect US to like it at all - they started it all after all with DMCA etc.
> My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.
While that is true, the datacenters hosting those servers are going to lose a massive amount of monthly income by not having those servers colocated anymore.
And just out of curiosity, how many small/medium websites would have the in house know-how to switch to a different CDN? Cloudflare fronts your site, giving you an 'automatic' CDN, where most others require changes to your site to work with.
> I suspect they'll follow the law and do what the court says
Which, to me, seems like a clearly worse outcome? I hate the feudal masters more than most on HN, if that somehow matters for the credibility of my own opinion.
The free offerings are not a loss-leader in the conventional sense of anticipating future upsell. They are a traffic generator used to drive up Cloudflare’s leverage when negotiating peering with carriers & service providers, in order to drive down the marginal cost of bandwidth for Cloudflare’s actual product, the enterprise DDoS protection, with the criticality of traffic interchange expenses being evident in the vehemence with which Cloudflare discuss peering matters, such as via the astroturf’d “bandwidth alliance” grouping they sponsor.
In which vein, anyone familiar with The Peering Playbook will recognise the kind of annoying hardball Prince thinks he is playing, but I doubt it works on nation states.
> In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand.
This isn't international law though. It's an authoritarian move by the Italian government. "Technically" and "legally", you're correct that Cloudflare is wrong for not building infrastructure to help Italy censor the web from Italians, but sometimes you should break the law if you disagree with it strongly enough.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but I find it interesting that no where in your comment did you try to justify the behaviour other than to say "it's the law". But that is the problem. Why is it the law? Do you think the law is justified?
> My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.
Completely agree with you there. Seems like a pretty stupid move to be honest. If I were CEO of Cloudflare I'd probably just shut my mouth and censor the internet.
My conspiracy theory is that the EU is actively trying to create their own cloud through regulation after seeing the economic success from china's internet companies after the great firewall.
Unfortunately, the EU is not nearly coordinated for such a thing. And even if they were, regulation is not what will make it happen. EU is in a crisis of financial (VISA, AmEx) and software services (AWS, MS, Google) being almost entirely provided by USA. They are not going to dig themselves out of the hole by regulation.
For contrast, USA is (largely) dependent on China, Korea, and Taiwan for chips. But they decided to attack the problem by investing several hundred billion dollars to develop their domestic microchip manufacturing infrastructure [1]. This appears to be paying dividends already as TSMC is already producing chips in Arizona, and estimated 30% of all production of 2nm and better to be produced in USA by 2030.
It seems to me that this is the way nations take control of their problems. Unfortunately EU seems incapable.
This is called "digital sovereignty", and it has been a major topic for OpenInfra foundation and other open source cloud foundations. Open source, and open cloud software, is the way to ensure your data can stay inside your own borders and be governed by your local laws. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvz2PcHq0yY is one example of folks talking about this, but realistically you can find talks from OpenStack/OpenInfra going back 4/5 years on this topic.
That's definitely happening. The US does this through massive government spending on American solutions. The EU is only starting to go that route as well.
>In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand
International law??
Italian law you mean.
Why should 1.1.1.1 block a site because some Italian wanted it blocked? Sod off.
Also I am Swedish, so EU here too. Sick of this whiny victim attitude.
Note the "general line". You know, bombing boats in international waters, abducting awful dictators and "running" the country sidelining the opposition, threatening to take over an autonomous territory of Denmark, meddling with German and British politics and generally behaving very much like fascists and a wannabe dictator.
First off, the immediate appeal to Vance and Musk is embarrassing.
It's a very unhinged, very Trumpy response. The repeated use of "cabal" and hyperbole is, as you say, embarrassing.
It's useful to know this is the official voice, tone, and attitude of CloudFlare. Now I know not to recommend it to my company. The owners would not be happy to do business with an organization that has its politics and alignment so close to the surface.
A group of people who were elected by nobody, should, without any accountability or due process, be able to ban any website they don't like from the internet? And not just for Italians but globally?
Even if you think this is a great thing for Italians (I have no idea why anyone would think that), you expect the whole world to surrender to this absurd demand? Categorical imperative???
Piracy Shield only works within Italy. No provider has ever been expected to take down sites globally in response to a Piracy Shield trigger, or has ever done so.
Also read the start of the comment. See this?
> as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist
unfortunately this preamble doesn’t add the weight you assume it should. what has being italian got to do with having an opinion on this? this and all the other “italian here” takes below. fwiw unless eastdakota is being intentionally malicious, he, with the cloudflare legal team, understands the situation and its implications for cloudflare better than any random italian.
Cloudflare is talking about Italian law and Italian policy and making comments about his actions they will take in Italy with Italian users specifically.
“Italian here” as in “I am not a random person with no skin in the game / I live in the country and presumably am more well informed on the policy he is talking about.
If there was a post about a law in nyc, I think it would be helpful to hear takes from New Yorkers.
I also didn't enjoy the bit where, after saying the EU was against what Italy is doing, then blames the whole continent of Europe for this policy...and then inflicting it on the UK, which despite brexit, is still in Europe
Cringey and childish appeals to US government and billionaires aside, it’s funny how this is framed as “Magnanimous Free Speech Technology Company” vs “Evil European Bureaucratic Shadow Cabal” when the latter is more like “Massive Sports Monopoly Regulatory Capture”.
When corporate entities do something bad, like attempting to maximize profits by capturing regulatory entities and bending them to their will, it’s the government’s fault. It’s laundering agency: the corporation has no agency because it simply seeks to maximize profits, but the bureaucrats have agency and are therefore morally wrong (Cloudflare CEO appealing to morals in his tweet).
Very few comments in this thread decrying the root of the issue, which is that the football media empire has grown large enough that they’re imposing negative outcomes on the pubic hand that feeds them.
Cloudflare is not for the open internet; they can you kick you out of their service if they don't like you whenever they want, which is fine and legal for that matter or they freaking can have an outage and have your service shut down that way. It's a lose, lose situation. Stay out of Cloudflare, there is nothing good about them.
That's an epic polemic. If the cost of operating in Italy isn't profitable, exit Italy. If it is, then adhere to the laws of Italy. If Italy makes the cost of business too high they'll dial it back.
Given the La Liga situation in Spain with Cloudflare you can't really say he is wrong. But his MAGA comments make me ashamed to be a Cloudflare customer.
Which MAGA comment, specifically? Are you referring to this?
> While there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration, I appreciate @JDVance taking a leadership role in recognizing this type of regulation is a fundamental unfair trade issue [...]
You may or may not agree, it hardly seems MAGA though.
The CDN is the least crucial aspect of Cloudflare for me. There's really no one else that has Pages, Workers, KV, R2, WAF, etc at the same price. You need to stitch services from multiple providers.
Bunny is the closest option I've found but still lacking in some areas and the pricing is quite different.
> It's impossible for either a government or parliamentary body to tell to an indipendent authority what to do and what not to do
What did Borghi mean by this? Isn't that the equivalent of a US senator publicly stating that the FCC is outside of the US federal government's ability to reign in?
American services leaving the European market would be a blessing for european IT, but alas the europeans are not kicking then out, instead milking for fines.
I WISH cloudflare did all the things they threaten to do, but they won't
CF: 'Cloudflare is not the hosting provider of the reported content. Cloudflare offers network service solutions including pass-through security services, a content distribution network (CDN) and registrar services. Due to the pass-through nature of our services, our IP addresses appear in WHOIS and DNS records for websites using Cloudflare.'
It's a shame that Italy is going down this path. As an Italian, I'm very disappointed and worried that these kind of fines are issued.
The worst part: because this has been issued by Agcom, it is also likely that this is not caused by the current government. Agcom is a bunch of bureaucrats that do not report to anyone other than themselves.
Eastdakota is right in saying that the rule of law is being disregarded. As a lawyer, and as someone that has been studying Italian institutions for decades, the problem is real and is only getting worse.
(in details: the action was carried out by the Central Directorate for Scientific Police and Cybersecurity within the Department of Public Security, Ministry of the Interior).
The domain resolves (by many DNS, 1.1.1.1 included) to Cloudflare IPs :)
The Italian 'piracy shield' is indeed reprehensible, but the tweet is very far out there as well. For all I care Cloudflare blocks the entirety of Europe for a week or so in protest, but aligning yourself with the bunch of fascists now in charge of the US government and prefacing that with "while there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration" is pretty insane as Cloudflare will be at the complete mercy of their lawlessness, if not now, then in the future.
This seems easy enough to solve. Every time the football oligarchy catches too many IPs in their dragnet, you can accidentally drag all the legitimate football exit nodes into your DNS blacklist. The only way to be sure DNS doesn't work for pirated football is to ensure it doesn't work for any football.
Secret? You can say a lot about the USA in Venezuela but secret isn't it and of course it was authorized congress explicitly granted the president the powers to do it.
Why do people go out of their way to criticize Trump like this?
Attacking other countries without declaring war is a staple of pretty much every US president since WW2, republican or democrat. Carter is the only one who stands out (ironically, despite the fact that he had a good cause to invade Iran).
Yep. It sounds like “shadowy cabal” is just an emotive term for “deputised decision-makers doing something that is inconvenient for my organisation”. There’s nothing shadowy about it. It’s just not American.
If there were an EU shadow cabal who exactly would you run to help for?
When Bonasera’s daughter is assaulted and the perpetrators released, he goes to Don Corleone. That makes sense. It’s not funny or ironic that he turns to criminals to help with criminals.
What an absurd twisting of reality this is. There is no EU shadow cabal, as opposed to the very real not-so-shadowy cabal currently running the USA. Where the EU is concerned with a rule-based order, justice, and fair conditions, the US administration engages in open corruption, cronyism, and outright rule by force.
The CEO of an American company complaining about the unfair treatment in Europe is more than ridiculous.
Probably because the admin has been vocal and proactive about extraterritorial overreach by European countries hellbent on global censorship programs.
The UK has thrown thousands of people in jail for speech on social media, as has Germany. Both of those countries also attempt to censor speech OUTSIDE of their own countries too.
[2] "Internet freedom declined in the United Kingdom during the coverage period due to a reported increase in criminal charges for online speech"
[3] "A separate report from The Telegraph found that 292 people had been charged for spreading false information and “threatening communications” under the Online Safety Act between when it came into effect in 2023 and February 2025. Some civil liberties groups expressed concern that the laws were being applied broadly and in some cases punished speech protected by international human rights standards (C3)."
"Internet freedom declined in the United Kingdom during the coverage period due to a reported increase in criminal charges for online speech"
"A separate report from The Telegraph found that 292 people had been charged for spreading false information and “threatening communications” under the Online Safety Act between when it came into effect in 2023 and February 2025. Some civil liberties groups expressed concern that the laws were being applied broadly and in some cases punished speech protected by international human rights standards (C3)."
292 is not thousands though, is it? Making the statement a barefaced lie.
That is before we go into the actual cases of what those people did. I'm concerned about it too, and am able to freely engage with my political representatives over it. They listen and discuss it, because we are a functioning democracy. But hyping it up and lieing about it doesn't help the discussion. Please don't do what everyone else does next and post about one specific case that on a cursory examination seems troubling, I won't be drawn into it.
Surly this post must have the opposite effect of what he intended. Even if you side with Cloudflare on the core issue this post is so cringy my butthole collapsed into itself.
Are Americans not embarrassed by the way these tech bros operate? As a European it’s obvious that the US gone from an allied to an enemy. I would feel like a traitor if I picked US tech these days.
As a non-American (and non-European) I got the foul stench of ‘American upset that other legal jurisdictions exist’ before I even finished the first sentence. The absolute slathering on of such emotive language feels very disingenuous. It’s immediately obvious that I’m being taken for some sort of ride. I can picture Kyle’s dad from South Park, at his computer, with his glass of red, writing his Yelp reviews. I genuinely don’t know how anyone can write like this and think that it’s a good look.
It is banal to observe that an agency of a government can act orthogonally to another, and also the citizens of the country.
I have noticed a trend post-2020 of a higher level of emotionality and impulsive thinking among government and business leaders in the United States. Hopefully thermostatic opinion engages and this trend reverses.
Just by looking at the profile picture my douchebag detecting spidey-senses were tingling. And reading further down the text with people he brings up as he cries for mommy... ding ding ding!
Since when Cloudflare started to fight for Open Internet? Thanks to them last year we weren’t able to visit many websites. If that’s how they perceive openness, they have to think twice.
His whole #freespeech theater would be slightly more convincing if they did not praise America's neo fascists in the same tweet and also if cloudflare did not work in, for example, China (where I guess they comply with local censorship).
It's fine to defend your profits but don't pretend you defend anything else.
“any sites a shadowy cabal of European media elites deemed against their interests”
Does anyone else find it difficult to discern truth in this era where everyone seems to want to pray in your emotions. My gut is that he’s angry for the right reasons, but it’s hard for me to trust anyone who tries to use the words “shadowy cabal” in a serious context.
> Italy’s communications regulator AGCOM imposed a record-breaking €14.2 million fine on Cloudflare after the company failed to implement the required piracy blocking measures. Cloudflare argued that filtering its global 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver would be "impossible" without hurting overall performance. AGCOM disagreed, noting that Cloudflare is not necessarily a neutral intermediary either. [...]
I respect and agree with Cloudflare's right to pursue the decisions that Matthew Prince outlined — even if it is used as retaliation or a threat. What has completely turned the tone of the message for me is appealing to Elon Musk & JD Vance for democratic values and free speech.
I can't really take it seriously when free speech and democracy are pretended to be important only when the interests of the political figures of the US admin or of Elon Musk are at stake. Those values are supposed to be enjoyed by everyone and followed through on, no matter whose agenda and interests they may harm (or improve) as a result. At this point, they are tools (or weapons) that are appealed to when one's interests (or opinions, or feelings) are threatened.
If we listen to JD Vance and Elon Musk, we get the idea that it's the leftists and brown immigrants and democrats and woke people who are making everything worse, inciting violence and terror, are a block to prosperity and advancement, a threat to Western civilization. And thus, free speech is important to only further repeat and consolidate these points. The other way around cannot be entertained even as a possibility. They are exempt, for they are free of such flaws and imperfections.
It is a difficult balance to keep between universal values, such as democracy and free speech, and one's own interests, such as political and financial. I would want to see more honesty than a pretense of complete devotion to these values. No one is. I am not, for that matter.
I don't buy into Matthew Prince's appeal to free speech and democracy, but I am open to happily changing my mind in an incident where Cloudflare consequently takes an action that would harm the interests of said figures in a meaningful (not symbolic) way.
>Using global revenue is further example of the extra-judicial overreach
Thank companies that transferred their national revenue via shady tax evation tricks into other countries so that their national revenue was nearly zero.
As an Italian with little interest in watching soccer (pirated or not), I have just read AGCOM's decision and it provides a bit more context (although with typical legalese language):
- right holders used the piracy shield platform to report Cloudflare-owned IP/FQDNs used for piracy streaming
- Italian anti-piracy law mandates that "IT service providers" (rough translation) have to comply with AGCOM orders by enforcing blocks at the DNS or IP level or with other technical or organizational measures
- in 2024, AGCOM told Cloudflare to appoint someone in charge of these matters, highlighted that a lot of piracy websites use Cloudlfare, and invited Cloudflare to join itself the piracy shield platform
- again in 2024, following additional notes explicitly sent to Cloudflare (apparently via snail mail, but I guess it's for legal reasons) and published on AGCOM website, AGCOM also invited Cloudflare to join the "Technical Board" of Piracy Shield, basically the forum where ISPs discuss technical aspects of how Piracy Shield is actually implemented
- in 2025, AGCOM told CF to block certain IPs. CF didn't reply and AGCOM checked that those IPs were not blocked (surprise? I guess?), so AGCOM formally told CF they were violating the law. AGCOM also asked CF and Guardia di Finanza (Italian police specialized in fiscal/financial matters) to report CF's European and Italian sales figures. CF gave these data (which are redacted in the public AGCOM document).
- CF replied with a long list of observations, essentially saying that 1) CF hasn't joined piracy shield so they don't know which IPs should be blocked, 2) there is a pending hearing at the TAR (the court responsible for complaints against government/public entities/regulators decisions), 3) CF has no technical way to "know, control, modify or interfere in any way" with the content published by its customers, 4) even if blocked by CF the website is still online, 5) setting up a DNS filter will be very complicated and will impact performance (latency)
- AGCOM argued that 1) yes, CF hasn't joined piracy shield but it also didn't accept the invitation to join its technical board and, anyway, when it asked CF to block certain IPs it actually listed them, 2) AGCOM is not accusing CF of violating copyright laws, but of not complying with these piracy shield measures and, because CF actually didn't block those IPs, there is no need to wait for the other court hearing. In addition, other court hearings have considered CF responsible when illegal websites are hosted using its services, because of the reverse proxy service (basically, the CDN itself) and the fact that CF services can optimize performance and allow users to reach a website even when it's blocked (I think they're talking about their 1.1.1.1 DNS), 3) over 11 years, CF received a lot of notes from AGCOM because of domains hosted/protected by CF, but never challenged them, and in many cases CF was acting as reverse proxy for these domains (surprise?) 4) blocking these resources is mandated by law, and that resources not hosting illegal content anymore have been "unblocked" in the past, 5) CF has the technical knowledge to set up this kind of filters and should be organized to be able to comply with various laws and regulations.
I think this gives a bit more nuance. By the way, personally, I would argue that it's not true that CF has no technical way to "know, control, modify or interfere in any way" with the content, precisely because it acts as a giant reverse proxy/MITM. Arguing about the validity of this law (although the law was written by the parliament) or its implementation is one thing, but claiming that a CDN has no technical way to block resources seems a bit naive.
Their dns service is used for circumventing illegal sports streams. And when a government institution wants to prevent that (ideally, before the end of that match) it is an evil cabal and cf is the protector of free internet and tags #elonmusk
Banning them or not banning them has nothing to do with evil, it has to do with due process. CF complies with lawful protection against piracy or gets tfo. For me, throwing a tantrum on twitter, riling people up and telling daddy elon doesn't change any of these definitions.
In case people can’t/don’t want to read something on X, here is the statement:
Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined @Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet. The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any sites a shadowy cabal of European media elites deemed against their interests. No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency. It required us to not just remove customers, but also censor our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver meaning it risked blacking out any site on the Internet. And it required us not just to censor the content in Italy but globally. In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online.
That, of course, is DISGUSTING and even before yesterday’s fine we had multiple legal challenges pending against the underlying scheme. We, of course, will now fight the unjust fine. Not just because it’s wrong for us but because it is wrong for democratic values.
In addition, we are considering the following actions: 1) discontinuing the millions of dollars in pro bono cyber security services we are providing the upcoming Milano-Cortina Olympics; 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; 3) removing all servers from Italian cities; and 4) terminating all plans to build an Italian Cloudflare office or make any investments in the country.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. While there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration, I appreciate @JDVance taking a leadership role in recognizing this type of regulation is a fundamental unfair trade issue that also threatens democratic values. And in this case @ElonMusk is right: #FreeSpeech is critical and under attack from an out-of-touch cabal of very disturbed European policy makers.
I will be in DC first thing next week to discuss this with U.S. administration officials and I’ll be meeting with the IOC in Lausanne shortly after to outline the risk to the Olympic Games if @Cloudflare withdraws our cyber security protection.
In the meantime, we remain happy to discuss this with Italian government officials who, so far, have been unwilling to engage beyond issuing fines. We believe Italy, like all countries, has a right to regulate the content on networks inside its borders. But they must do so following the Rule of Law and principles of Due Process. And Italy certainly has no right to regulate what is and is not allowed on the Internet in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Brazil, India or anywhere outside its borders.
It's not "quasi-judicial". They have no judicial authority, at all, despite how they present themselves.
They can only show them their supposed findings to a ministerial judge and tell them "Weeeh weeh, Cloudflare is being mean".
Then the judge will look at the AGCOM analysis, listen to Cloudflare or an EU representative or whoever may raise an objection to those findings, and then, after a loooooong time, enforce or not the fine.
I think the fine is wrong, but the attempt to weaponise JD Vance and Elon Musk doesn’t look well at all.
The next time they see something they don’t like hosted/protected by Cloudflare they will only have to ask more or less nicely and there is a good chance Cloudflare will handle it for them
The interesting part is that neither the AGCOM nor Cloudflare quite understand how each other really work. Also they both believe they got more leeway than they truly have.
AGCOM is an institutional apparatus, they operate separately, but not independently, from whatever leftwing or rightwing government in charge for the most part (past Berlusconian interests aside) and everything they do is entirely subject to not getting out of the guidelines imposed by the EU, no matter what they want anyone else to believe.
Frankly the best course of action for Cloudflare would be getting in touch with the Board of European Regulation pointing them out that AGCOM is, probably for the hundreth time I guess, overstepping their authority. And they should stop right there, otherwise they're the ones that will be actually fined.
Well put. Several nuances are most likely lost in translation. Nevertheless the Cloudflare CEO took it as an opportunity to out himself as a buffoon and harming Cloudflare's international reputation.
Of course it's about football/calcio. I love Italy and almost everything related to Italy (I'm a Juventus fan to boot), but in this the Italian officials are way out of their element and behind the times.
That's a pretty bad take. This whole situation came into existence because CF has positioned itself as a convenient choke point. The Italian government is dumb, but 'eastdakota' is being dumber here. JD Vance and Musk are about as poisonous to international relations as it gets and bringing them up in relation with Europe making and enforcing its own laws - no matter how misguided - makes me think you should probably focus on the beam in your own eye first.
As for the rest of the threats: please do. Europe needs less, not more dependencies on USD and US companies. We'll figure it out, or not.
If a company choses Cloudflare they would have great service everywhere except Italy. If they chose a service with lower quality / reach, they will suffer degraded service across the board. If they try to use more than one CDN that’s a lot of hassle.
It’s not clear which way the decisions will go in reality. Past experience suggests that tech companies eventually accommodate local laws, trading complexity of explaining this to customers for complexity of implementing targeted blocking tools.
A lot depends on the next couple of months and the US's continued belligerence against - former? - allies. If that isn't toned down, and drastically so then I expect there to be many more consequences than just for CDN providers.
They're at 82% or so of all websites using CDNs, other providers are extremely small in comparison. CF is this large because of a feedback loop with respect to being able to deal with large denial of service attacks. They are - for most serious players - the only game in town now.
censor from the Internet any sites a shadowy cabal
of European media elites deemed against their interests
Has he recently gone full conspiracy theorist? (Also what's that cringy chatgpt picture supposed to tell us?) Who is the shadowy cabal of EU elites? If anything EU is purely politicians obedient to USA interests. I'm guessing this is what happens in tech when the tide starts to shift, because tech doesn't have morals, it's all just about money. Start praising the new administration no matter what they do, until they're not popular and start praising the next thing. Looking forward to his back-to-woke pivot in 2 years.
It might not be a conspiracy theory. Europeans have serious media skeletons in there closet.
Consider La Liga in Spain. When football matches are on they have a blank check to block whatever they want wherever they want. Genuinely they take down all of cloudflare and all kinds of shit. I think they were even DNS banning everyone on .tv TLD. Its wild how much legal power they have.
This was brought up on hacker news often.
They also have their apps spy on users microphones and gps to detect where someone might be watching their streams to make sure you aren't doing it in bars. [1]
Italian media is trying to do similar stuff with their piracy shield stuff. [2]
AtomicDig219303 on Reddit when Italy blocked all of google drive.
> Wait, I don't think that your post describes how fucking idiotic this whole thing is. Piracy shield is a system implemented by AGCOM (which as OP said is a governing agency) and basically "gifted" to the fucking mafia that is Serie A (yes, the football/soccer league) to block access to pirated streams of football matches.
He is partially right. The Atlanticist faction in both the US and Europe has been working to get the internet under control since 2016. This project started as a backlash to the Trump election and moved into high gear with COVID and Ukraine. This faction has a sincere belief that the prior openness of the internet is a threat to the international order, as it prevents authorities from shaping civilian perceptions and behavior.
The battlefield has become more complex since 2016, as the old international order is pretty much dead now, so you have competing factions of Atlanticists (US rump admin/UK/FR/DE/Brussels) versus nationalists (US/Israel/Eastern Europe) who both want control of the internet, but through different means and for different reasons. You could also tack on BRICS nations who decided that the best path is to wall themselves off from the open internet.
Go ahead and downvote, you know I’m right which is why you won’t offer even a single comment in response.
Each of these factions trying to kill the open internet is doing it for selfish reasons and all are in the wrong for doing so. You’re strangling an international commons for your geopolitical games. Shame on all of you!
He contradicts himself in the span of a single sentence. How is it possible that this was done solely by Italy (with concerns from the rest of the EU) and yet this is the work of a cabal of European media elites? If this were true, why isn't the entire EU involved?
That's not really a self-contradiction; if we pretend the USA's copyright lobby had made California pass a similar law… well, that might not work, I have no idea if that would be unconstitutional inter-state trade restriction or something in the USA, but for the sake of showing why it's not a self-contradiction can we pretend?
If the US media elites had convinced California to do that, they'd be a "shadowy cabal of [US] media elites", even if there was opposition from the rest of the USA.
Again, don't read too much into if this would actually work in the USA, the EU is not the USA, this isn't that kind of comment.
US media elites got DMCA and YouTubes copyright strike introduced, I suppose they were powerful enough to sidestep the states and go after Congress instead.
This is a continuation of LaLiga vs Cloudflare in Spain. Spaniards are just blocking the whole CF IP ranges during the broadcast of important sports games, shutting down half the internet altogether. Italians are trying another way.
I can't ad hoc the best solution for all, but asking for help from Elon Musk and JD Vance, two prominent borderline fascist figures of our time, is disturbing.
Another reason to dump an american big tech firm and switch to Bunny.net for example. Better a democratic based error than an american greed based CEO.
I got the impression that he might be trying to imitate Trump's communication style as part of his appeal to the US administration throwing its weight behind him here. Particularly given the image attachment at the end. It's difficult to imagine that nobody qualified double checked this before he posted it.
He event went as far as personally canceling a Tesla customer's order for criticizing him. That's how petty he is. He has no interest in freedom of speech whatsoever, it's merely a talking point.
Freedom of Speech guarantees the right to speak. Not the right to have no repercussions.
Elon has GREAT interest in Freedom of Speech, it enables him to have far more power than regulating the type of "speech" he showed in cancelling that customer's order.
Besides attempting to get him murdered by a crazy person seeing a chance to be famous, what possible reason does someone have to constantly broadcast the location of his transportation? What difference does knowing where it or he is make in the daily lives of anyone? What long term planning does the information give to people?
Musk is a contrarian. He, however, is not a government body (nor does he represent one, u can choose to include the dubious Doge efforts into the discussion but that will devolve into semantics that do not negate the point). As a private citizen with a platform for which he overpaid - he can do as he pleases within the confines of said platform. Musk, however, cannot enforce fines on other providers and request stuff from them. This is what the post is about.
Again, apples and oranges. Private citizens vs government. Musk has no power given to him by someone, the government does, using that power in a way that might be considered abusive/authoritarian might yield (deserved) backlash.
I'm not sure if I'm not getting something. It's a for-profit organization vs a government entity. It's not even remotely similar.
If they publicly state that the house is a "town square" (he has said that of twitter), and they say that they are a "free speech absolutist" (he has said this of himself in the context of this house/town square/website), and state that "By 'free speech,' I simply mean that which matches the law.", then yes, if they don't let you spray-paint (tweet) whatever you want that's not strictly unlawful (like, ah, calling for civil disorder in the UK?), they are indeed a hypocrite.
When the house is digital (twitter is), why even use spray paint as the analogy?
I'm sure there are popular Italian websites behind CloudFlare. Say, train tickets. Probably not, but just for the sake of the argument.
1. Order comes to block address 69.69.69.69 within 30 minutes
2. Quickly switch Trenitalia to 69.69.69.69. Which is fine, because CloudFlare probably doesn't promise you any specific IP address, so they can assign them from the pool as they please.
3. Block 69.69.69.69.
4. In the whole country everyone who tries to buy a train ticket or check the schedule sees "train service doesn't work because football, please try again after the match", effectively paralyzing public transport.
5. Average Giuseppe learns about the ridiculousness of the situation and gets upset.
6. The government suddenly has to explain to the people what happened. They cannot pin the blame on CloudFlare (as per current fine), so the only remaining scapegoat is the football association.
>Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online. That, of course, is DISGUSTING
What's equally disgusting is that one corporation has managed to put itself in the position to dictate these things instead. Cloudflare has literally been running a denial of service on congress.gov (any many other important domains) for at least 3 years if you aren't running latest chrome or latest firefox or similar.
Like a broken clock, he's not wrong. But it's the pot calling the kettle black.
Damn, that’s a pretty disappointing statement. Some parts are correct but then he goes completely overboard. After everything that has been happening the past year with the new administration it’s hard to keep supporting this as a European.
While he has a point and Italians are kinda embarrassing in their politics, can't help the feeling that he comes off as a bit of cry-baby. Trying to win points with the JD/Musk mafia that hard seems weird and icky. Seems like signaling to other billionaire bros that they belong to their faction, which in my books isn't that great either. That last uppercase line a cherry on top of shattering my image of CF as respectable tech-vendors.
Europe's censorious behavior has become completely absurd, and reading the Italian docs (as several people here have already shared) doesn't make me more sympathetic. It's a real shame, and I'm disappointed that the dream of an internet free from censorship and manipulation seems to be forgotten by so many here - in favor of political squabbling.
"you must block things in germany after it goes through a formal government process" versus "you must block things globally even for places not subject to italian law because an italian media company doesn't like it"
There's more than a subtle difference betweeen the two.
I'm in Germany and Cloudflare DNS doesn't Block eg Annas Archive for me, while my ISP does. I also don't reckon Germany tried to fine Cloudflare yet. So what is your point?
The driving force behind this is getting pirated streams of football matches knocked offline. Currently by the time any action is taken the match is over, which is why they want the response-within-30-minutes.
This is about football streaming, the cabal media elites are right holders fighting illegal streams, which 1.1.1.1 bypasses even if filters are put at the ISP level.
I read through that and I'm not a fan of Cloudflare. I live in the EU, I dislike the increased control that the EU keeps desiring - but generally we've fought it with various degrees of success. I feel it's a bit disingenuous to act like the US has total internet freedom since you're the folks that invented ISP letters.
Regardless of that, what really bugged me was the threat of removing the free-tier service for any Italy based accounts, which despite being fully in their right to do, is a shitty thing to threaten with - and it's shocking he would threaten that so easily.
So yes, my reaction is now to move all of my shit from Cloudflare as soon as possible because I don't see CF as a reliable partner right now after that tantrum.
As a side note: just today Polish president veto'ed a law that would allow similar government power.
The government coalition instantly turned on "think of the children" rhetoric in response. I think they are misreading the public sentiment on this one though.
This tweet is unhinged and disappointing. Another techbro billionaire. I've sold what little stock I had in Cloudflare and will be moving off their services.
the tweet starts off pretty strong, which I didn't care for but I understand. this phrase however feels wrong. i guess i don't understand Italy, but isn't this like saying the SEC or FCC is quasi-judicial?
> In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online.
ah, unlike when CF themselves decides unilaterally, not even as part of a cabal, what should and should not be allowed online. got it.
Threatens retaliation against the individuals in Italy directly on top of the government, and I notice he specified "based in Italy" not "Italian citizen".
Then goes on to thank JD Vance, and crow about Elon "I censor anyone who offends my ego" Musk as being right on Free Speech being in danger.
Also the "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." which sounds synonymous with FAFO which this admin is using to mean "if you resist us, we will hurt you"
If he had just said that Cloudflare is unwilling to comply with these terms and is leaving the Italian market as such, that would be one thing, but this reads like he just ordered his MAGA hat and is going to suck up to the current admin to get them to pressure another country.
Lets add the hypocrisy here too, since he says that countries shouldn't regulate outside their borders, and is then running to Uncle Same for support
> "I will be in DC first thing next week to discuss this with U.S. administration officials...
> We believe Italy, like all countries, has a right to regulate the content on networks inside its borders. But they must do so following the Rule of Law and principles of Due Process. And Italy certainly has no right to regulate what is and is not allowed on the Internet in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Brazil, India or anywhere outside its borders.
> I appreciate @JDVance taking a leadership role in recognizing this type of regulation is a fundamental unfair trade issue that also threatens democratic values. And in this case @ElonMusk is right: #FreeSpeech is critical and under attack from an out-of-touch cabal of very disturbed European policy makers.
Pretending to take a principled stand against censorship but then randomly throwing flowers to two of the biggest threats to freedom of expression is deeply hypocritical, and makes it really hard to take his reaction seriously. And let's not forget that really vile AI image that is sure to alienate all Italians against Cloudflare.
At this point, I'm wondering to what extent all this batting is driving the EU calls for digital sovereignty, and to what extent those calls will be turned into actions.
The other night I was thinking about graphene. Not the OS, the material.
‘We considered patenting; we prepared a patent and it was nearly filed. Then I had an interaction with a big, multinational electronics company. I approached a guy at a conference and said, “We’ve got this patent coming up, would you be interested in sponsoring it over the years?” It’s quite expensive to keep a patent alive for 20 years. The guy told me, “We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it’s really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us.” That’s a direct quote.'
So, we absolutely can get stuff done, the Americans just keep buying us up (DeepMind) or stealing it or using initimidation (Graphene) or espionage (of Airbus for benefit of Boeing way back).
Indeed, but that doesn't mean I have to be fine with that. He already had a perfectly good case against that fine, but using the occasion to cozy up to actual fascists completely discredits him to anyone serious.
I don’t know the backstory but Cloudflare arguing for an open internet is super ironic, presumably he means they want the be the one to close it off and are upset that someone else is ruining their monopoly on it.
1.1.1.1 DNS is just querying root DNS servers. And @elon.jet twitter account was just querying ADS data and posting it. Its exactly same, yet this guy praises Elon.
DNS lookups via 1.1.1.1 are also directly fed into the US surveillance state so peter thiel can use his palantir dashboard to see if you are the antichrist or not.
A government agency in Italy which is known nation-wide to complain and fine other institutions for the stupidest and pettiest reasons, fined another institution for a stupid and petty reason. But of course, ignorant people just see this single occurrence and make up conspiracy theories about it. (Really, if you looked at some examples of previous fines and complaints by AGCOM you would laugh your ass off independently of your political stance)
> this means a court order can't block a single cloudflare site without blocking every cloudflare site
Not true. Cloudflare can't block only a single web site _by IP address_ but that's pretty common with IPv4, The same is true of Fastly and AWS and I'd be shocked if there's a mass-market CDN out there that has a unique IPv4 address per customer.
They can absolutely block any site they want at the application layer (SNI or Host header or whatever they use, IDK, I'm a network guy).
I honestly don't see the irony. I believe Cloudflare tries to argue for an open internet. I use some of their features on the free plan and it's of tremendous help, especially considering the price I pay (ie 0$). I'm actually super glad that Cloudflare exists.
So you think it's fine that if some Italian agency orders Cloudflare to block some domain on it's 1.1.1.1 public DNS (or Google on it's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) it should be blocked for everyone on Earth who is using this DNS server, including yourself? And if you think otherwise, you are merely "upset that someone else is ruining their monopoly on it"?
I suspect the "we're an American company and we're going to get the government protection racket to threaten you" gambit isn't going to achieve the results he's hoping for.
I was reading through this and at first I saw Italy as the bad guys, demanding ridiculous asks. The moment the "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." nonsense appeared, followed right after by callouts to Vance and Musk, and threats that he's going to stomp his little feet to the administration...good god, this is pathetic. He looks like a clown. A snivelling, whiny, entitled clown.
lol, ban Cloudflare from Europe. Honestly, at this point all American companies should be banned everywhere but the US, as every American oligarch like this guy does this "We're American gosh darnit!" bit while this administration talks about annexing allies. Disgusting, deplorable behaviour.
a) sovereign nations can impose literally any rule they want on foreign businesses, even if those rules are ridiculous, arbitrary, or defy the "freedom" values of some other country.
b) This incredibly tired "I'm telling Daddy Trump!" bit is pathetic, and it, among with the fact that America is currently -- by far -- the most dangerous country on the planet, should yield garbage people like Price getting their ass handed to them.
He lost me when he started thanking fascists (Vance, Musk et al) who are actively attacking speech in the US they don't agree with. The hypocrisy is unbearable.
> We believe Italy, like all countries, has a right to regulate the content on networks inside its borders. But they must do so following the Rule of Law and principles of Due Process.
I really couldn’t care less about your legal philosophy, mate.
I understand that you’re used to corporations setting the rules, and I’m sure that it brought you such great joy to write a little post where you got to flex about being well-connected with your country’s morally corrupt administration. However, your views on whether or not a country had a right to self-regulation, have zero impact on your obligation to comply. You don’t get to parachute in and set your own terms. Do you really think that your childish threats of ‘pulling your free plan’ and ‘not opening an office’ will have the intended effect? I genuinely can’t work out why someone didn’t tap this kid on the shoulder and suggest that he tone his rant down a bit.
The US is a sick, sick country. Nowhere else does anyone have the misplaced confidence to act this insanely stupid.
I do appreciate reading a PR, from a CEO, that's not unsalvageably tone deaf. At the first half, I was wondering what the point of this was, given if Italy thinks this is something they're allowed to apply across the globe. That instantly makes this a political issue they probably need to be talking to the State Department about. Then I got to the 2nd half, and was impressed that I wasn't immediately annoyed by the ass kissing.
I assume Cloudflare has a great PR team because this feels like a master class in rhetoric. Given how you're expected to solicit help these days.
Rhetoric aside, it'll be interesting to see how the whole thing plays out. Italy seems to have taken out a hammer, and their d.... well, I'm just gonna hope the Internet wins this one.
No? In a disagreement with Italy, cloudflare is definitely going to need the intervention of the US administration. This (angry Twitter post) is how you're expected to ask for help in this timeline. I was expecting to annoyed with the faux allegiance. But here, I think they communicated their distain over the behavior as best as they could, while still asking for help.
I might not like it, but I understand it.
Equally, I might be wrong; but this feels to me like the post tries to as subtly as possible communicate that they have problems with the administration (my expectations for anyone who is at all ethical) While still also needing their help. And if I'm wildly incorrect; and cloudflare is actually in love with the administration, then it's still a master class in rhetoric, because they tricked me, which was probably the point?
For the first couple of paragraphs, I almost agreed with this dope. Thought he was a moderate on the wrong side of things after the next couple of paragraphs, and after the AI-generated anime picture, I'm pretty sure the guy is a groyper.
Let's be a bit more honest here, I think the Italian law is badly defined, but I also think the american perspective is wrong.
We (all tech people everywhere me included) argued for a lot of time for free speech on the internet, but the result currently is that we built a system that is free speech for Russian and Chinese bots and actors. In Europe we are under daily attack from Russian accounts that spread massive amounts of desinformation, deep fakes, just emotional appeals with the goal of destroying liberal democracy. The US government is actively trying to support them by fighting against any kind of European rules and spreading their part of desinformation.
This is not about normal politics, Europe is under siege.
> we are under daily attack from Russian accounts
We would go a long way if our communication platforms weren't intentionally amplifying the most controversial voices for the sake of maximizing ad revenue.
Back in the day the Russians needed to spend money to buy influence. Now they can just make their propaganda engaging enough and Western companies will happily host it and promote it for free.
> Now they can just make their propaganda engaging enough and Western companies will happily host it and promote it for free.
Important to distinguish here that all of these companies are not just Western but American.
I'm sure there's examples of non-US media companies pushing ragebait and similar. e.g. from the UK, there's BBC, Telegraph, Daily Mail, local news sites etc.
It's a perverse incentive that in chasing engagement, the ragebait is selected for.
Isn't that just "culture"? Let the best content win? It used to be that the USA was comfortable competing and winning along these lines.
If you tautologically define "best" as "that which wins", sure.
There's many ways for something to be better than another thing, though, and a lot of stuff is winning because it's best at "engagement" even if it's really bad in many other ways.
> If you tautologically define "best" as "that which wins", sure
Spot on. By this metric, we should shift all agricultural and pharmaceutical production to heroin.
Yes (sort of), but the definition of best has changed so drastically built on completely different benchmarks (engagement)
As an example, watch a really good documentary on something, I would consider it best
But it might have less views than some AI slop video perhaps even generated in a minute
Another aspect relevant to the propaganda discussion is that I think modern algorithms have decided that ragebait is the best form of engagement and this is why propaganda might spread fast and how social media might actually actively help the foreign nation
I would argue that this is one of the reasons social media actively harms but its that profit over all for social media seems genuinely harmful. We need more focus on bluesky and mastodon and other alternatives as well to establish a network effect there but also that I would argue that prosecuting social media / large tech companies should have such a case where something can be prosecuted criminally for a class law suit case so that these social medias can stay better in shape than being deranged
But the issue to me feels like I am already protesting Italian even fining because in this case to me it feels like abusing the vagueness of the law and other factors so I am sure that if we give govts more power they might have the ability to abuse it as well for some lobbying powers (in this case it seems to be football)
Everything boils down to what the genuine incentives of the govts are I guess. I mean some are trying to do somethings but I guess all of this is just really tricky and the answer is in a series of changes and not a single one. There is nuance to this like every other discussion
Ok, but are we losers who cannot compete culturally? Where's the faith and confidence? We can't compete with AI slop?
Can broccoli compete with heroin? Why don't we offer people both and see what they like better? Let them compete! Give people choice!
Who gets to decide where to draw the line?
This is the entire problem. This is possibly the single problem in the modern world. When social media first appeared, "feeds" were based on explicit subscription by the users and ordered chronologically. Later "likes" were added, but this was still based on deliberate user behavior and simple deterministic sorting while the ability to "repost" greatly expanded the reach of individual posts, later algorithms were introduced then the number of signals expanded beyond explicit user input to implicit engagement measures. Each step along this path has taken agency away from individuals.
I read articles and comments about people who were fired or suffered other consequences for something they said online, and the responses are righteous indignation--they ought to have known better than to post these things online! How did we get into this fucked up state of affairs? Social media started off as a way to talk to your friends, and over time your friends have been replaced with strangers, what they can say and who gets to say what controlled by centralized authorities, while individuals have been taught to self-censor.
It is not only the US companies or Russian bots, every government in the world is itching to get their thumb on the scale here to have a say in what the people are allowed to see, to hear, and to say.
That would be a political perspective. But what we are discussing now is some very rich football clubs who have a right to filter anything on the internet because they say so.
Well, we cry "freedom of speech" when Russia/China/adversary shuts our propaganda-pushing media or tools out.
Freedom of speech for me, not for thee, eh?
I don't want my politicians deciding what is good or bad on the internet. I'm an adult, and I can decide for myself.
Free speech for the individuals is needed, in terms of people should not be punished for what they say. But social media platforms owned by foreign countries is a danger for any democracy. There's a reason the US wants to capture Tiktok, Iran is shutting down the internet, and China has The Great Firewall.
Since the US is turning away from Europe's interests, it's just logical that American platforms will be restricted in one way or another. I don't see any way around it.
There is a big difference between danger for democracy because of these addiction farming Social media platforms with propaganda and something like piracy as well though.
> I'm an adult, and I can decide for myself.
No you can't, all of this stuff is designed to influence you without you knowing it, or you would not be influenced. This is like thinking advertisements have no effect on you.
People pay good money because they know it is effective, it is influencing you, you cannot decide for yourself.
So who gets to decide? Someone who is above influence? Who is that?
There has to be a lot more nuance. I clearly see that both Putin and the CCP do a lot of things predicated on the exact claim that their respective populations can not be left to decide for themselves. "People left free would make bad decisions, we the rulers are morally obligated to force them into a good path". I think this is the ostensible meaning of "freedom is slavery".
There has to be nuance yes. But the nuanced position starts with accepting the reality that a ton of people are indeed having their brain turned to goo. Just go outside of the bubble of somewhat tech literate highly educated young people and look at what 60+ year olds consume on Facebook.
There's AI generated content with tens of millions of views that is as fake as ancient aliens on the history channel but nobody seems to realize it. If you comment here there is a high chance you did not grow up among people with 8 years of basic education who haven't read a book in 20 years and believe quite literally everything they see. That is what a decent chunk of any population is like. The biggest blind spot of well-educated internet libertarians who taught themselves how to code at 15 is that they in all likelihood have no concept of how the average citizen navigates the world.
The problem with Putin isn't that he thinks a country needs intelligent and wise leaders, Plato would have told you the same thing. It's where he's steering it that's the issue and that the country's leadership is no more capable at the top than it is at the bottom.
Doubtful.
The current methods of subverting speech involve the opposite of control.
They involve overwhelming the channels.
The play is to influence at m scale, millions of individual choices, just like yours.
Your position is no longer the entirety of the defense we need for free speech online.
> Well, we cry "freedom of speech" when Russia/China/adversary shuts our propaganda-pushing media or tools out.
That "cyring" must have been awfully quiet, I didn't hear anything at least.
I don't know if any of the links below will count as crying; but here are some, from the British media reporting on Russia:
"The EU condemns the totally unfounded decision by the Russian authorities to block access to over eighty European media in Russia.
This decision further restricts access to free and independent information and expands the already severe media censorship in Russia. The banned European media work according to journalistic principles and standards. They give factual information, also to Russian audiences, including on Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine.
In contrast, the Russian disinformation and propaganda outlets, against which the EU has introduced restrictive measures, do not represent a free and independent media. Their broadcasting activities in the EU have been suspended because these outlets are under the control of the Russian authorities and they are instrumental in supporting the war of aggression against Ukraine.
Respect for the freedom of expression and media is a core value for the EU. It will continue supporting availability of factual information also to audiences in Russia."[0]
Funny, eh?
[0] https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/russia-statement-high-repres...
> I don't want my politicians deciding what is good or bad on the internet. I'm an adult, and I can decide for myself.
The issue isn't whether politicians are deciding what's good or bad.
The issue is that, in Europe, foreign actors with explicit ill intent are deciding a ton of the content your neighbours are watching/reading, day in day out, on the internet. AI has made this easier and even more scalable than before. This content is being used to influence or outright decide elections. Elections of more politicians that are "deciding what's good or bad", eh. Such as politicians deciding that Russia is good.
What the actual fuck do we do to defend ourselves, pray tell? The whole "let them have critical thinking" doesn't work, we are under active war and citizens who don't know better are specifically targeted. And besides, we are not gonna take lessons from the country that yelled high and mighty for years they're the land of the free, and let itself fall into complete autocracy & dictatorship. In the US, those same citizens are the useful tools repeating state propaganda, two steps removed from "Just Following Orders".
And full context: I agree with Matt and support Cloudflare's stance here. But people can quit it with cheap retorts like "Freedom of speech for me, not for thee". It's not that simple.
into complete autocracy & dictatorship....ummm you mean a democratically elected president & government? Plus these hyperboles don't really resonate anymore as they've been used for every little thing people don't like. It's still a democracy even if you don't like the outcome.
>What the actual fuck do we do to defend ourselves, pray tell?
Delete smartphone, logout from abusive SaaS.
So, putting your head in the sand and pretending the world doesn't keep turning?
Deleting X (which I've done) doesn't stop Russia from influencing the voterbase of my neighbouring countries. Now what?
Because freedom of speech was always a misguided creed at best.
The speech of the manipulator is not the same as the speech of the expert and they shouldn't be given the same treatment, lest you want psychological warfare waged on your nation.
American free speech extremists like these tech CEOs are either willing patsies or useful idiots in the hybrid warfare against Europe.
What rules can you possibly have that distinguish the expert and the manipulator in all cases, without abuse?
I think free speech comes from the same base as universal vote: any selection mechanism would be corrupted and in the end cause more harm than good. That is why the solution is to let everyone speak / vote. If you have some uncorruptible people or mechanism for selection, just use that to make policy decisions directly.
I think the solution is to elevate critical thinking in the populations, so people can be less vulnerable to psychological warfare. Otherwise you're just picking a different manipulator - whoever writes or enforces the speech limits.
I think the solution is to elect a commission of experts to be deciding this. Term limits. Separate independent institution from the government - no meddling.
Critical thinking even in those capable of it is a limited resource. I can't spend all day every day critically examining every single statement the internet flings at me - it's mentally exhausting and wears one down.
Let's elect proxies to do it for us.
Elect by the people at large? People who voted for Trump and such? What's the point in an elected institution separated from the government - the government is already elected, and people will mostly vote for candidates from the same parties in all elections.
Besides, "elect a comission of experts" is a contradiction. Experts are not elected. Expertise is not determined by voting. You want to appoint or select a comission of experts, or elect a comission of politicians. These are the choices. Appointment or selection will be done by someone else, likely politicians too.
You just hope some incorruptible competent people will get there by magic. They will not.
If you could do this, just elect a comission of experts to run the country, instead of this "truth comission" that makes sure people are well informed to vote correctly in elections for the real government, which will in turn run the country. Why do the indirection? There is no reason, if you could "elect" good people, but you can't.
And who will watch the watchdogs?
The electorate.
> The speech of the manipulator is not the same as the speech of the expert
I don't think that's contentious. The point of free speech is not that all speech is equally valuable or positive. It's that I don't trust you to decide which speech shouldn't be allowed, because that power will 100% be abused, until it's just as pernicious as the "manipulators" it's claiming to defend against.
>American free speech extremists like these tech CEOs
well, claim to be free speech extremists at least
Indeed. I think with some of the more government-aligned oligarchs it's more of a pretense to enable said information warfare.
These tech CEOs just want to have to spend as little as possible to maintain their platforms. They don't actually care about freedom of speech beyond that.
> I don't want my politicians deciding
The whole concept of democracy is based on this: you elect politicians, they decide. If you don't like that, you don't like democracy. Which is fine, but then you don't get to defend it either as the best system under the sun, etc.
A lot of people naively interject "But we're not a democracy, we're a Republic!" at arguments where it has no real bearing, but _here_ it does.
We (America) are not a democracy, we're a constitutionally limited republic. Republic is a subset of democracy, but the 'constitutionally limited republic' part is important. We cannot elect politicians to censor the things that we want censored because our republic has not authorized the government to do censorship, and the bill of rights expressly forbids it. They are constitutionally limited from doing so until and unless the constitution is amended.
Until and unless we change the constitution, any efforts to do that are illicit. Popular democracy would allow a majority to vote to bring back slavery, and if you don't like that, you don't like democracy.
It's not obvious that democracy implies autocracy.
This kind of "epistemic collapse" via propaganda is an established method of subverting nation states, Russia has been doing it for decades.
Democracy relies on having a reasobaly well informed population. The problem today is that it takes ten times more effort to refute bullshit than to spread it. Information hygiene is becoming a very big problem in this anything-goes social media environment.
Traditional mass media had journalistic norms and standards, nowadays anyone can claim anything with no quality control.
It's the same age old story: there simply is no substitute for good governance, Italy doesn't have it and hasn't had it for decades, and "freedom of speech absolutists" wouldn't know what it looks like in the first place.
I am not on any social media so I don't even know what the propaganda is that you are talking about but there are ways to really filter out youtube in such a way (by following unbiased media houses) and I haven't seen much propaganda on youtube (I think)
> This is not about normal politics, Europe is under siege.
I am not European but this seems such an dangerous precedent to set upon. You mention destroying liberal democracy but also the fact that Europe is under siege makes people think of providing war time resolutions to Countries even for small details (and Mind you this ban itself has nothing to do with russia that much, its just the amount of influence football has in italy)
To me it feels as if by saying Europe's under siege, it gives more war time resolutions or justificiations for unmoral behaviour. In fact that's what happened right now. This also actively undermines democracy and one can clearly see how.
I understand your comment's in good faith and I appreciate it but I am just not even sure how this move of fining Cloudflare for not being in line for their censorship is related to this other instance.
I think this is moving the goal post. Cloudflare isn't challenging the need to restrict access to some websites, it is challenging who has the right to decide. Quoting the tweet:
> We believe Italy, like all countries, has a right to regulate the content on networks inside its borders. But they must do so following the Rule of Law and principles of Due Process.
I live in Italy, I'm a citizen. I don't feel any safer having the internet regulated by a bunch of bureaucrats than I do state actors and bots.
Bureaucrats are a problem, but they're eventually accountable to the people. Companies are accountable to shareholders located in another country, who don't give a damn about whatever so long as the money keeps coming. I choose bureaucrats against businessmen anytime.
The west have had various forms for this since before the internet, and certainly have huge efforts similar to what you list above, but have in general been far more productive than bots from the other side.
How is Cloudflare refusing to comply with DNS censorship even remotely related to propaganda campaigns conducted by the geopolitical opponent of your personal choosing?
Not only does it seem like you've gone off topic to push a personal agenda, you're presenting a false dichotomy. We could (if we wanted to) wall our networks off along national boundaries while still preserving freedom of speech within our enclave. I don't think that would be a good idea nor do I think the execution of such an initiative would be likely to go smoothly but the example serves to illustrate that there's a huge potential solution space.
Personally what I don't understand is why Cloudflare didn't stop offering access to 1.1.1.1 from Italian addresses. At the end of the day picking a direct fight with the government of a jurisdiction you operate in seems extremely unwise. I fail to see the upside for them here.
Actually assuming they don't intentionally operate 1.1.1.1 from within Italy how is it CF's problem if Italians access it? Shouldn't this be on the Italian telecoms to filter traffic to this dastardly "illegal" foreign resolver?
I think the upside is drawing a line in the sand now before they tighten requests any further and (maybe) not losing the revenue from some genuinely illegal pirating services that use them.
Russian bots and subversive propaganda in general take hold when the quality and diversity of the media decreases, which leads citizens to listen to alternative narratives.
The tipping point happened during covid - the authorities were so synced up with the media, and the online censorship became so prevalent that the official narrative felt deeply off, coordinated, and often contradictory. There was no debate in the EU, we had to lock down all of the countries, with no alternative (for instance, protect old people but let younger ones live their lives) possible.
Given how Orwellian and borderline crazy average media discourse had become, especially after the vaccine was out, I saw many people start looking elsewhere. My mother was one of them. She had consumed mostly state media her whole life. As she realized how stupid the narrative had become (state media was discussing if it was ok to sell socks in shops, or if doctors should examine unvaccinated customers), she and others like her turned to online media promoting fringe and radical theories.
Now, the European bureaucrats, having not learnt their lesson, want to double down and further restrict freedom of speech. The problem is that as long as the local media just repeats the official party line, which often strays away from reality, russian content farms will get new eyeballs.
The problem with this argument, and why free speech absolutism is the only stance that makes sense, is that someone always has a good reason why you need to throw the bathwater out right now, baby be dammed.
The end result is worse than the disinformation.
How do you know the end result is worse than disinformation? If the Russian disinformation allow Russia to destroy the freedom and democracy in Europe, and allow Russia to take over, that seems to me to much worse than limiting the publication of lies and slander.
Because whoever gets to determine what lies and slander are become your new dictators.
If the problem is Russian bots, there’s a much easier way to solve it: make Facebook and the platforms that allow them to spread financially liable.
You’re unironically arguing that giving up your freedom is a protection against losing your freedom.
Freedom is a scale, not binary. I'm willing to move a bit on that scale to avoid going completely to one of the opposites. I completely disagree with your suggestion that if you don't have complete freedom, you're at the complete opposite end, I.e. zero freedom.
Hear me out, but: You can elect a commission of experts to be deciding this. Term limits. Separate independent institution from the government.
That's not a dictator. You're just grasping for hyperbole to prop up an ideological point.
It’s called a jury. We have those. They’re the commission that determines if something is slander.
Something doesn't need to be slander to be information warfare. We need something much larger scale and more powerful to fight back the hybrid warfare from Russia and increasingly also the US.
Is it possible that that belief is itself influenced by the propaganda you’re worried about? If I were Russia I’d do my best to create a rift between the US and Europe.
Europeans have compromised “democracy” in an effort to protect “liberal.” And that will unravel the whole thing.
I see lots of disagreements here, but I must say I also soured on free speech. I used to think that free speech was necessary and overall a positive for society. Then I saw the Capitol attack in US. The disinformation spread in England about kids stabbed that led to riots. I see disinformation every day, especially from USA, saying Europe has no freedom, that it's overrun with criminals, and people not only believe it, but vote accordingly. This has to stop. Humans weren't trained to use rationality and reasoning every second of their life. Reason costs a lot of cognitive power so the brain implements a hundred shortcuts. For example: if you see something appear frequently, you assume it to be true. This is good for avoiding poisonous plants, but it's terrible when you go in Twitter and you're spammed with the same lies day and night. It's messing with us. Enough is enough. Free speech with guardrails.
You should be able to insult and criticise the Prime Minister.
You should not be able to gain a position of power and then go on a crowded stage to claim that vaccines cause autism. This is intolerable. We are attacking the foundations of society. People are not rational actors. Not you, and not me. We are very simple animals.
I agree that people clearly don't use critical thinking 100% of the time and are easily influenced.
But you're basically arguing for not criticizing the status quo.
Many social improvements have been attained by "attacking the foundations of society". How would you like living under some absolute monarchy? How do you think gay people would like to live in a church-run society like 500 years ago?
"But you're basically arguing for not criticizing the status quo.", but that wasn't what was argued ("You should be able to insult and criticise the Prime Minister."), but more your interpretation of what was said. You're making a strawman argument.
Well, the PM isn't exactly the status quo, I wasn't replying to that. Rather, I was responding to this specific bit, emphasis mine:
> You should not be able to gain a position of power and then go on a crowded stage to claim that vaccines cause autism. This is intolerable. We are attacking the foundations of society.
Not sure when the strawman is. "The foundations of society", for me, means "the way things are". Which can be vaccines, sure, or any kind of general policy which has been showed to have a positive effect on society, but it can also be all kinds of things taken for granted which aren't necessarily rooted in reason.
To be really honest, I share a similar stance to you overall but I would still admit that there is some partial truth to it
I would like to expand this not only to foreign state actors that people mention but also companies inside which are actively trying to do nefarious stuff
As an example, Tobacco industry knew that the damages were there but they still tried to spur up medical confusion around it all so that people would still think that medical discussion is going on when it was 100% clear that tobacco harms. Who knows how many people died
The man who discovered that washing hands saved lives was so ridiculed and I think met with hostility because doctors couldn't comprehend the idea that it was they would could spread diseases. This is decades before germ theory was invented
His name is Ignaz Semmelweis and the world was unjust to him. Doctors ridiculed and threatend him and he was labelled obsessive and doctors called it mere coincidence. His career crumbled as he was forced out of vienna/his hospital and his mental health deteriorated as his warnings were ignored
in 1865 Semmelwise was commited to an asylum where he died just two weeks later at age 47
Only after pasteur developed germ theory and lester pioneered antisceptic surgery, semmelwise was finally vindicated.
This simple practise of handwashing is now considered the most basic medical standard worldwide saving countless millions of lives in the process.
(I had to write it by hand here basically transcribing this really amazing video that I watched about such a topic, I would highly suggest watching it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBCOh1SYQYA (crazy people who were proven right)
Semmelwise's stories can brings chills to spine.
Yeah, I want to be more supportive of free speech, but I don’t think anyone is doing a great job of representing how to do it in the social media age. FIRE does a terrible job of it with mostly platitudes with no nuance.
But one maybe counterintuitive reason I don’t like free speech absolutism in the social media era — one of the platitude’s of FIRE is like, “the answer to hate speech is more speech” and “I want to know who the racist are so I can avoid them.”
1. The answer to nothin in this firehouse of speech in modern society is “more speech”.
2. Part of the peace we used to have in society is I didn’t have to know about everyone’s political opinions. Loosely speaking maybe I thought small-town folk were close minded, but there weren’t tens of thousands of examples of it across feeds on the internet all day.
To be honest, I think this argument is FUD as well. There are some Russian accounts and there is disinformation, but this isn't the core of polarization in western democracies and Europe in particualr. And reigning in free speech is even poison in this situation, which is more complex than pointing your finger at bots.
In Europe freedom of speech is under threat from its own population, which is more and more driven by fear. This fear might not be unreasonable and has multiple sources, but it remains a bad basis for decision or policy making.
The fear is being heavily stoked by agitprop on social media.
WTF? How are you attacked by russian accounts? This childish notion of thinking that only "true" thoughts are allowed under free speech, and the rest must be eradicated needs to die.
If you don't like the risk of russian accounts, don't follow them, and follow accounts that you like. It's as easy as that.
You have news, government news sites, journalists, newspapers, it's never been easier to find sources to trust and compare them against each other.
Screaming murder because Sergei6778 says that Ukraine is evil is just stupid. Take responsibility for your own reading and mind, and stop using the law as a hamfisted tool to stop free speech. Take the bad with the good, or else there won't be any good left in the future.
While I agree with your sentiment, it's more and more clear to me that reality doesn't reflect it. Many people are extremely easily influenced by easy to digest soundbites.
I'm often baffled by the level of superficial and binary thinking even in "intellectuals" (as in people who hold degrees and you'd expect to have at least a modicum of critical thinking). More often than not it seems based on emotions.
Now have these people spend most of their waking hours doomscrolling some echo chamber on tiktok, and I can see why some may be worried about the influence of some "bad actor".
Given this, and the highly polarized political scene (and I'm in Europe!), I have to say I'm quite worried as to how things will unfold. Hell, there's no need for Sergei and his friends! Just the local politicians' popularity contest is enough.
We don't have freedom of speech for its own sake because of some inherent good. We have it because it's a useful tool to get other peoples perspectives and allows us come to more realistic conclusions where most feel included. People paid by the chinese or russian government are in complete opposition to that spirit.
Note that it's always a claim of Russian (or maybe Chinese) propaganda. Never middle-eastern propaganda.
The level of radicalisation over Israel/Gaza really doesn't look organic, when compared to the reaction to other conflicts.
I don't like the risk of the mouth-breather next door reading Russian propaganda, it's not myself I'm concerned about.
In a democracy, most people are unfortunately stupid and easily manipulable. We can't let the Russians (or the Americans!) use them as their proxy.
So you want to censor what other people read? I don't think your neighbor would appreciate such patronizing attitude.
I don't appreciate my neighbors letting themselves be manipulated to do me harm. I think it's time we do something about it.
How are they doing you harm?
Mostly by voting in extremists that destroy the institutions that we built and offer us as a prize to their foreign masters.
Maybe they think that the current politicians are the ones who are destroying the Europe and it's you who is voting the wrong way?
The part about "foreign masters" doesn't make sense to me.
Well yes of course they do - because they've been manipulated by said propaganda!
Maybe the part about foreign masters makes more sense with this context:
https://www.krone.at/3350333
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/14/jd-vance-ali...
Not just Russia and China. Musk does Nazi salutes and Grok promotes pedophilia. Trump invades countries and talks about taking over Greenland, which is part of Europe. The US are no less of a threat than Russia.
Contrary to widespread belief, Europe has the means to fight those threats. It just chooses not to, for reasons I don't understand.
Most europeans are completely delusional.
Look at germany for example (where I'm from). Shutting down nuclear power plants and coal at the same time.
More than 50% of people here still tell you this is necessary to save the planet - even though what we save is so little globally, that it does nothing relevant to stop global warming.
so what? let politicians “protect” us? it already went too far. a lot of liberal democratic states are going towards electronic dictatorship, when you are under total control and allowed to do only what is permitted by somebody’s made-up rules. all those e-IDs tightly coupled with your biometric identity are no more than developing a simple idea — a simple idea that some people want to control other people.
so, no, thanks. i don’t want this, at least for those countries that are still more or less free from it. i already live in one where we have to fight this dictate every day: opening a browser, writing a post, doing whatever we want, but not the way guys who captured power want it.
this perspective — “just let them protect us” — comes from a democratic habit. when you’re used to living this way, you can trust elected people.
an account created 5 minutes ago
Their point still stands though
It isn't even obvious to me which country GP refers to when they write "i already live in one". No reasonable individual would criticize "liberal politicians" and "electronic dictatorship" without making it absolutely clear where they are coming from. This obfuscation seems like a deliberate choice and makes any standing point balancing on crutches.
How is that relevant wrt the argument?
HN should put the IP addresses that comments from brand new accounts are posted from right beside the name.
I bet you'd be able to plot some pretty interesting maps from that.
Maybe the first two octets but HN does not block proxies, VPS nodes, servers, etc... The site would have to block such things for new accounts and store the IP used to create the account for that information to be useful assuming residential shady VPN's were not used. I doubt that level of change would occur here given the topic of dark mode comes up often.
That isn't a Russian. It is me, an American. It is convenient for you to dismiss my arguments as Russian so that you can ignore their validity. The same thing happens in the US: people dismiss arguments by saying they are right wing (i.e., from Republicans)
Interesting how now the list has expanded to include Chinese "bots" and "actors". Calling anyone who disagrees with your political beliefs a foreigner is an old and extremely paranoid, nasty rhetorical trick. Very similar to the people who call everything they dislike racism.
The polls don't lie and they show that there are hundreds of millions of people all over the west who just flatly disagree with your whole ideology. The unity you imagine would exist if not for shadow accounts doesn't exist, and it's delusional to believe it does.
No no. Just accept that you're a totalitarian dictator at heart, embrace the warmth of just being evil publicly, without pretense or obfuscation. "Silence the opposition!" you cry.
Freedom of speech is binary, there aren't any acceptable degrees of it: either you have it, or you don't.
If there is disinformation, the solution is to counter it with actual information, to give the people better tools to identify it (like X's community notes), and to educate the general population so they will have better critical thinking.
Restricting freedom of speech is never a solution. How long until dissenting opinions are censored because somebody labels them "disinformation"? Who watches the watchmen? etc.
I'd rather live in a society with full freedom of speech and disinformation from State actors than have only 100% accurately vetted news.
> Freedom of speech is binary, there aren't any acceptable degrees of it: either you have it, or you don't.
That seems to be the American definition.
We don’t all have binary systems for our views and politics, and some of our democracies are doing better than than US despite our apparent lack of free speech.
It’s not even the American definition. We have many exceptions, particularly using speech to cause violence or physical harm in various ways. I’m also confused by American free speech absolutists because that’s not a thing here and essentially never has been.
Of course this is all hypothetical at the moment, as the current administration doesn’t seem to care much for the law.
Community notes typically kicks in after the tweet has already gone insanely viral. It’s not useless, but I wonder about its effectiveness.
I see your point about free speech but I think it has to be more nuanced. For example, where has continuing stupid anti vaxer debate left the Americans?
So, how do you feel about libel and slander laws? Don't they torpedo your binary framing there?
>> If there is disinformation, the solution is to counter it with actual information
So what you argue is that we should build good bots to counter the bad bots right? and all this in a "secret" to avoid suspension by the tech companies. This looks like playing stupid games.
The disinformation in this era can basically shadow any kind of legitimate "counter-disinformation". To make the game fair we would first need lockdown the internet content on citizen ID authorization so that we can identify if the free speach spread is actually published by a real person or some chinese bot pretending to be a single European mom with 3 kids.
This is not something anyone wants so I think the current trade off of court orders to take down content is legitimate and the best approach. Cloudflare, the tech companies and US government likes the absolute free speech like everything else (i.e. free market) as long as it serves their interests. I wouldn't be surprised to see Cloudflare proudly repelling some "chinese propaganda attacks" and frame it like a cyber security win instead of anti-free speech action.
> In Europe we are under daily attack from Russian accounts that spread massive amounts of desinformation, deep fakes, just emotional appeals with the goal of destroying liberal democracy.
The disinformation campaigns have always been there, the reason they're growing roots in the mind of the average European is because the EU is spending it's razor thon political capital on things Chat Control, Digital Omnibus which are wildly unpopular.
Isn't it a bit ironic that in order to protect "liberal democracy" you need to reach out for authoritarian suppression?
Yes we need to restrict the freedom of non citizens to influence our debates. And we need to have rules how digital platforms can influence our internal debates, we had this rules for TV and newspapers. That's not suppression thats's defense.
How do you restrict the freedom of non-citizens without restricting the freedom of citizens too?
My parents and grandparents didn't fight against the Romanian authoritarian regime for reading of confidential communications to come back under a EU banner instead.
The EU is more of a threat to itself than Russia is, the only reason the "Russian propaganda" has teeth is because the current bureaucrat class in the EU Council have outlived their Mandate of Heaven
For me, it's a matter of authenticity at scale...
Let's assume I want every citizen to navigate the web freely while fighting propaganda machines as much as possible, so that means I want an automated system that creates the set difference between these two in real-time, as reliable as possible. To create such a system, and since there shouldn't be any overlap in these two sets, I can effectively put my efforts in half if I put my work in the detection of one such set.
The scaling problem, as I see it here, arises from the following: While the set of individual citizens (kind of) has an upper limit, represented by the number of internet users worldwide, the botnet nodes in propaganda machines do not. I can limit the set further, for example if I want to focus on the citizens that are part of my government only, whereas propaganda machines can come from anywhere on the globe. Internet users already need to provide a proof on authentication for quite a lot of services, while botnets generally want to avoid being identified as such.
While I'm far from in favor of Chat Control, I can somewhat understand why these initiatives are in motion at all.
> The EU is more of a threat to itself than Russia is
To put it mildly, this conclusion is non-sequitur at best.
"The EU is more of a threat to itself than Russia is"; it can be easily argued that this is only the case if democracy has little value because in Russia democracy does indeed have little value (let alone life, etc).
"Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
So the EU and the EC are big lumbering organisation that make poor decisions; but then people make poor decisions day in day out. But just because you *feel* disaffected doesn't mean the system is inherently wrong (unless of course you believe that politics' primary, if not only, purpose is to make you "feel good(tm)").
It's probably far more accurate to say that wealth inequality is the EU's biggest threat and that "the elites" (which is more than just senior politicians and bureaucrats) don't feel the pain of inequality and so aren't internally motivated to do much about it (culture eats strategy for breakfast, etc etc).
The average person in Europe does neither care about chat control, nor have they heared more about tgan one or two surface-level news articles. Russian propaganda being more and more effective and these actions are not related.
Russian propaganda is effective because the EU leadership has dropped the ball so hard that the Kremlin looks attractive. People aren't as stupid as you think
Italian here.
If somebody wants to read the full document about the fine (in italian) it's here: https://www.agcom.it/sites/default/files/provvedimenti/delib...
Part of this doc states:
``` The rights holders also declared, under their own responsibility, providing certified documentary evidence of the current nature of the unlawful conduct, that the reported domain names and IP addresses were unequivocally intended to infringe the copyright and related rights of the audiovisual works relating to live broadcast sporting events and similar events covered by the reports. ```
So, I'm not sure anybody verified that what the right holders claimed was actually true. While I understand what AGCOM (the italian FCC, more-or-less) is trying to do, it seems that, as usual, a law was created without verifying how the implementation of such law would work in practice (something very common in Italy), and this is the result.
Cloudflare CEO seems irate, and some of his references are not great, but I'd be inclined at thinking he's got at least _some_ reason on his side.
Also another Italian here. For context, the "Piracy Shield" mentioned in the order is basically a legislative hacksaw authorized by the regulator (AGCOM) primarily to protect Serie A football rights. Soccer rules Italy more than the Vatican..
It’s a mess technically: it mandates ISPs and DNS providers to block IPs/domains within 30 minutes of a report, with zero judicial oversight. It’s infamous locally for false positives—it has previously taken down Google Drive nodes and random legitimate CDNs just because they shared an IP with a pirate stream.
The NUCLEAR threat regarding the 2026 Winter Olympics (Milano-Cortina) is the real leverage here. He’s bypassing the regulator and putting a gun to the government’s head regarding national prestige and infrastructure security.
My personal take idea likely outcome: Cloudflare wins.
EU Law: The order almost certainly violates the Digital Services Act (DSA) regarding general monitoring obligations and country-of-origin principles. Realpolitik: The Italian government can't risk the Olympics infrastructure getting DDoS'd into oblivion because AGCOM picked a fight they can't win. They will likely settle for a standard, court-ordered geo-block down the road, but the idea of Cloudflare integrating with a broken 30-minute takedown API is dead on arrival.
> The NUCLEAR threat regarding the 2026 Winter Olympics (Milano-Cortina) is the real leverage here. He’s bypassing the regulator and putting a gun to the government’s head regarding national prestige and infrastructure security.
Kind of wild that a private company has that kind of power, both in terms of being one of the few that can offer this service and they can make threats at this level.
I have to say I'm curious over whether that's actually leverage or a massively miscalculated threat that is just going to push the Italian population and politicians firmly against cloudflare.
I'm pretty sure if you tried that here (Canada) it would do the latter.
Would a regulating body in Canada do this, though? And if so, hopefully Cloudflare would say fuck you just the same as they did Italy. It's nice to see someone actually taking a principled stand for once.
If our politicians were stupid enough to pass a law telling them to - I sure hope so - we live in a place with the rule of law not the rule of whatever Joe at the CRTC thinks should happen. Regulators exist to enforce the will of parliament...
Would our politicians pass a law this unfortunate... I hope not... but I don't really have that much faith in them. The current government probably wouldn't, but governments change.
Referencing the Trump administration - the people going around threatening, deporting, arresting, taking money from, etc people as a consequence for speech they don't like - as the standard for free speech makes this far from a principled stand by cloudflare. They took their moral high ground and sunk it. This isn't about speech for them, just money.
You're free to believe all that. "Rule of Law" loses all meaning when corruption takes root. We don't like that "for my friends, everything, for everyone else, the law" shit.
Things can be morally wrong and still legal, and the law itself can intentionally enforce immorality. It's your civic duty to determine when upholding the law degrades you and every else more than following it does.
Also I feel like threatening to take your toys and go home when they don't play fair is a totally valid response.
"for my friends, everything, for everyone else, the law" is a weird description, when that's not the problem with this law at all. There's no question of selective enforcement going on here. The problem is lack of due process, not that.
It's a great description of one of the main tactics the administration he is asking for help uses though. Which again goes to Cloudflare entirely abandoning the moral high ground here.
Threatening to leave is "totally valid" in that it's their right to leave, but it's also not something that a sovereign country that cares about staying sovereign should give any respect to. The only response to a foreign corporation saying that that maintains your independence is "you can't quit, you're fired." Otherwise you just become beholden to the corporation providing you "charity".
> It's your civic duty to determine when upholding the law degrades you and every else more than following it does.
That’s a lot more complicated. What happens if a foreign power takes over Canada and changes the law? What is the state law goes against the laws stated by your religion?
It’s a thin line, better not deal in absolutes.
If a foreign power takes over your country and changes the laws in ways that conflict with the previous constitution, there’s a break in sovereignty continuity so your options are: 1. Pledge to the new authority and move on 2. Keep your word on your previous pledge and resist
I have to doubt that it would push the populace against the company when the company is actually both providing good (free protection, DDOS mitigation, CyberSec) and supporting appropriate judicial process to make decisions.
Political threats of withdrawing from an event in an explicit attempt to pressure the country is the opposite of supporting appropriate judicial process.
so you want cloudflare to pay fines that 2x revenue of italy customer while also demand cloudflare for services it provides ?????
not counting that the fines also outrageous, 2% global revenue and IP+Domain block for global despite it only Italy request it ????
Is this some weird variant of the right-wing claim that freedom of association is “censorship”? Why would a government be entitled to free shit?
No one is entitled to free shit, but anyone who says "I'll stop giving you free shit unless you do X" is not giving you free shit, they're engaging in barter. And bartering to try to change a law, just like paying to change a law, is obvious and illegal corruption.
Pretty sure, speaking as a Canadian, that the Canadian government would not be able to implement that kind of legislation. And that if they did, I would 100% back Cloudflare.
Not a fan of Cloudfare but why should it be responsible for providing pro bono services to the Italian government during the winter olympics?
If one gets drunk at the pub and threatens the staff after being served free drinks, they get thrown out. Why should this be any different?
In Spain they also have similar laws made specifically for UEFA and the broadcasters' mafia.
The services aren't pro bono if they're only offered in exchange for getting a law modified.
And if you offer people free stuff and then turn around and demand something in return, they're going to get upset and like you less than if you had never offered the free stuff in the first place.
There was no exchange implied... before this sentence. Cloudflare might well be justified in feeling that the other side altered the deal, so to speak.
This is one of the consequences of outsourcing this (and other capabilities) to the private sector.
Many governments simply don’t have the skill and political will to invest in these kinds of capabilities, which puts them at the mercy of private actors that do. Not saying this is good or bad, just trying to describe it as I see it.
Governments just can't come to grips with how much money software engineers make.
Paying a contractor $x million? Yeah no problem, projects are projects, they cost what they cost. Does that $x million pay for 5x fewer people than it would in construction or road repair? We don't know, we don't care, this is the best bid we got for the requirements, and in line with what similar IT projects cost us before.
Paying a junior employee $100k? "We can't do that, the agency director has worked here for 40 years, and he doesn't make that much."
Variants of this story exist in practically every single country. You can make it work with lower salaries through patriotism, but software engineers in general are one of the less patriotic professions out there, so this isn't too easy to do.
> Paying a junior employee $100k? "We can't do that, the agency director has worked here for 40 years, and he doesn't make that much."
I can assure you that junior software engineers in Italy or anywhere else in the EU make nowhere near that amount of money. In fact, few of even the most senior software engineers make that amount of money anywhere in the EU (in Switzerland or the UK they might see such salaries, at the higher tiers).
The figures I gave were in-line with the US (as that's what most of this audience understands), but if you scale everything by a certain factor, the entire principle holds basically anywhere.
Not really. US programming salaries are much higher than most other engineering and specialist positions, which makes it harder for the government to hire good programmers.
However, programming salaries here in the EU are much more in line with other specialist salaries, which the government already hires many of. So there is no significant problem in hiring programmers at competitive rates for government work. The bigger problem, and the reason this doesn't usually happen, is just ideological opposition to state services, preferring to contract out this type of work instead of building IT infrastructure in-house.
And they get exactly what they pay for. There's zero reason for a competent professional to stick around with that kind of pay any longer than strictly necessary (aka until their own gig or freelancing takes off).
Many people don't want to live in America. I know that if you're American that sounds crazy.
Not just governments, that same kind of greed exists in private companies too.
The only way to make good money while being an employee is to have your buddy spin up a "vendor" offering overpriced bullshit and shill it within your company. In exchange, you also spin up a "vendor" and your buddy shills it at his company.
This might explain why there are sooooooooo many vps providers/cloud providers, this might be one valid reason as to why.
I am sure that this might not be the only reason but still, its a valid reason for many. Do you know of companies/people which do this and how widespread this practise is?
To me it still feels like malicious compliance tho for what its worth.
I said this in jest as a reaction to what post-tax SWE salaries in Europe top out at, all while the same companies have no problem burning insane money on vendors. There is zero incentive to do good work as an employee as it won't be compensated anywhere near what even a shoddy vendor gets paid.
But given the rise of many SaaSes selling exactly the same thing every full-stack web framework used to provide for free - think Auth0, Okta, etc, it may very well be happening.
> Paying a junior employee $100k?
In Southern Europe? More like $30k gross.
How is revoking pro bono work you volunteered 'wild'? Should offering services lock you into indentured servitude?
> Kind of wild that a private company has that kind of power
Also kind of wild that it’s a private US company pushing their current political views on another sovereign state. Cloudflare as a political tool of leverage is a level of dystopia we really should try not to unlock.
What are the exact political views the Cloudflare is pushing here?
That it is unreasonable for Italian soccer rights owners to try to use Cloudflare to enforce their broadcast restrictions with 30 minutes notice?
That it is unreasonable not to have a appeal right for these restrictions?
That the technical solution demanded is technically infeasible?
Not sure that these are political views at all.
They're threatening to take their ball and go home. If they move all of their operations out of Italy, under what principle does Italy demand they block content globally? Should Wikipedia remove their page on Tiananmen Square because the Chinese government demands it (which they would, if they thought it would work)?
The Chinese are smart enough to realize how evil you look if you ask for s.th. like that.
i think it’s quite normal and always have been normal for companies to leave countries when the regulative environment goes against them.
I can assure you that a lot of Italians agree with Cloudflare on this topic.
I think the parent is trying to say that whatever issues Italy may have internally, it's not up to Cloudflare to comment or enact solutions on their own.
> but the idea of Cloudflare integrating with a broken 30-minute takedown API is dead on arrival.
Why? Technically it’s very easy. Wha if JDV asked CloudFlare to implement this on a different occasion? Would it be dead on arrival?
A system like this could actually work as long as every takedown request involves posting a significant bond into a holding account and where the publisher can challenge the block and claim the bond if the block is ruled illegal.
This achieves the advantages of quick blocking while deterring bad behavior, and provides cost-effective recourse for publishers that get blocked, since the bond would cover the legal fees of challenging the block (lawyers can take those cases on contingency and get paid on recovery of the bond).
This is one of the very few non-money-laundering use cases for crypto.
I would support a “5 cents per unsolicited email” email system, in a similar way. If you make it a mildly enjoyable $5/hour task to read the first sentence or two of your spam folder, the overall internet would be better.
I don't get how censorship of this kind is even technically feasible?
I can rent a vpn on AWS, then connect to a stream hosted in Kazakhstan. You can't take down a website there, and you certainly can't rangeban AWS ips.
Which stream, asking for a friend :)
Can they not block your AWS account though?
Italy can also buy the bluff and you know, partner with an EU company to provide them the service Cloudflare would offer "for free".
There is no “EU” company with remotely the same network capacity or capability, in general
BunnyCDN is a good contender for the network. They can find another provider for cybersec.
BunnyCDN don't run their own network, most of their servers are hosted at DataPacket(.com), but they use some other hosting companies too.
DataPacket has a very large network though and is kind of, sort of EU-based. AFAIK most operations are in Czechia, but the company is registered in UK. And there's also the Luxembourg-based Gcore.
Can someone report a bunch of government websites and legal streaming services and see what happens?
Only right owners can report websites, the Piracy Shield is essentially a tool in the hands of “Serie A Soccer League” and DAZN.
How is the rights holder verified in 30 minutes?
I'm always reminded of this: https://youtu.be/y9SygP4BDxE?si=DoulFlfNWlGrDxnW&t=185
"Just look at me, tell me I'm not Kramer"
They aren't
I'm sure they have a preexisting relationship with AGCOM.
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.
I guess they were inspired by a very similar law in Greece from 2002[0] where in an attempt to outlaw illegal gambling done in arcades a poorly written law outlawed all games (the article mentions it was in was in public places but IIRC the law was for both public and private and the government pinky promised that they'll only act on public places). I remember reading that some internet cafes were raided by the police too :-P.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_3037/2002
Reminds me of US Pinball laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball#Relation_to_gambling
An arcade stuck in the early 00s would be my ideal third space though.
Have you seen Arcade Time Capsule? It is very accurate recreation of a classic arcade with games you can actually play if you provide the ROMs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LOtkGN138Q
Not the OP, but I tried it when it came out. VR headset technology wasn't good enough for screens within screens and it was nauseating more than anything.
There's also impedance mismatch between using the headset controllers and the physical ones in the game. Ideally, I should be able to use my own fightstick in an augmented reality configuration.
The quest 3 is good enough and the Galaxy XR is incredibly high resolution. But it isn't a really ideal way to play arcade ROMs for long term but just to enjoy the nostalgia.
How is the Galaxy XR? I want one but I can't justify it if it doesn't connect to my non-Samsung work laptop.
I got it for $75 a month for two years. Visual clarity is incredible and monitor replacement level but comfort is meh so I bought studioform creative head strap which helped a lot. You can use Virtual Desktop to connect to any computer easily.
I'm a sysadmin so I bought it to see if it would work when I want to ssh into systems I'm physically near in racks. It has worked really well for this.
We live and have lived in a technological civilization for more than a hundred years. Legislators have NO EXCUSE to hide behind 'we don't understand the technology'. Sure computers are complex. But so are nuclear reactors, combustion engines and food safety.
If nuclear reactors cost 3x what they should, yet safety incidents occur 2x as often as they could because of stupid legislation, they shouldn't be able to hide behind 'we only have a legal diploma so we can't figure out what actuall works'.
For some reason, a lot of older folks consider computing as a 'low stakes game', as computers being either an annoyance or convenience but nothing more.
I don't know if the system is fundamentally flawed, and the people in charge are becoming less and less able to actually handle the reins of society and some major upheaval is necessary, or the system can be fixed as is, but this seems endemic and something should be done.
> a law was created without verifying how the implementation of such law would work in practice (something very common in Italy)
To be fair to Italy, this happens everywhere quite frequently. In my country (the US) we do this all too often.
Except that in the common law system of the United States, a judge can throw out the regulation.
That's very much not the difference between common and civil law
If the law is constitutional it can't be thrown out by a judge in common law and if it's not it can be declared so in civil law
The difference between the two is more about what happens in the absence of a law
> So, I'm not sure anybody verified that what the right holders claimed was actually true.
Yup, this will be weaponized by the MPAA/RIAA
Wait, so is this about censorship, or about copyright?
If the latter, I don't see why CloudFlare is complaining about "global" censorship. The US would simply seize the domains (which they have done so many times before), but I guess Italy doesn't have that power...
Sometimes it's hard to differentiate between the 2. In this case it sounds like copyright in name but the implementation is such that it's a big hammer that can also be used for censorship if followed.
It's about copyright. Seizing domain names (registered outside Italy of course) can't be done in 30 minutes which is what the football overlords want.
What is it with Southern Europe and the football overlords? Spain is blocking half the internet, Italy is fighting Cloudflare. What's up? Are football leagues big political donors?
Football is extremely popular, and football clubs (and their owners) are quite influential (socially and politically). But it's a little bigger than that.
EU is pushing for measures against live-event piracy[1], because they frame this as a systemic threat to cultural/economic systems, giving national regulators broad cover to act aggressively.
While football is quite huge in Europe at large, the impact to GDP of these broadcasting rights is sub-1%; however, lobbyists have a disproportionate impact: you have the leagues themselves (LaLiga and Serie A for Spain and Italy respectively), you have the football clubs, and you've got broadcasters. Combined, they swing quite high, even if the actual capital in play is much lower than the total they represent.
Add to this politicians who can frame these measures as "protecting our culture", get kickbacks in the form of free tickets to high profile games, see rapid action because blocks are immediately felt and very visible, and incentives for increased funding from regulatory agencies because "we need the budget to create the systems to coordinate this", and you can see how the whole system can push this way, even if it is a largely blunt instrument with massive collateral damage.
[1] - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=intcom%3...
Football, the clubs, are also major driver of money laundering. Dirty cash buys a lot of politicians.
https://www.comsuregroup.com/news/a-red-card-for-dirty-money...
Yeah, in Europe, there tends to be an association between football fans and organized crime, just as there's one between unions and organized crime in the US.
The kind of hooligans who love beating up the hooligans from the other team are also perfect from beating up the hooligans from the opposing drug cartel.
A company that would profit from more regulations arguing for more regulations. No way !
As usual, cronyism.
In Spain's case Telefonica (largest telecom, used to be state owned) is private but has a large State participation and the government literally appointed the latest CEO.
Guess who sells the largest football games as part of their expensive TV package?
Guess who asked a judge to order the other telecoms to also block Cloudflare IPs?
If this is true, and seems likely. There is some satisfaction seeing corrupt cronyism agencies getting slapped with a hard "NO" when they are used to getting what they want.
No usually the political figures are football league owners.
Jokes aside, I don't know, the obsession with soccer is extreme in Italy. For people who don't care about soccer like I did, there is so much you have to endure just "because of soccer"
It's not just Italy. The UK is also insane along with some cities in Spain. In the UK one of the rivalries supposedly goes back to the War of the Roses [1].
The way I describe EU football games to Americans is take the craziest student section at a US college football game and extrapolate that energy to the entire stadium.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeds_United_F.C.–Manchester_U...
Spain especially but southern europe in general has a really crappy economy. Soccer teams are some of the wealthiest organizations in these countries, which means theyre the ones who are able to fund politicians which means they can get laws passed.
Those football leagues are run by the literal Mafia
There's no accountability or due process. According to this brilliant law, if some crony with write-privilege adds your website to a list, the whole world has to ban your website within 30 minutes no questions asked.
Germany has an equivalent within the CUII, which is also a censorship branch of the government with no judicial oversight.
There is no such thing as "no judicial oversight" in Germany.
Judicial oversight took a while in Germany, but it is there now (but I guess you will always find an incompetent judge if you really want). I wonder if cloudflare would implement the German blocklist now that we have judicial oversight. Currently it is as nice registry for pirating sites for anyone using 1.1.1.1 [1]
[1] https://cuiiliste.de/domains
That overstates things somewhat.
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/llglrd/2019...
> To some extent, judges are subordinated to a cabinet minister, and in most instances this is a minister of justice of either the federation or of one of the states. In Germany, the administration of justice, including the personnel matters of judges, is viewed as a function of the executive branch of government, even though it is carried out at the court level by the president of a court, and for the lower courts, there is an intermediate level of supervision through the president of a higher court. Ultimately, a cabinet minister is the top of this administrative structure. The supervision of judges includes appointment, promotion and discipline. Despite this involvement of the executive branch in the administration of justice, it appears that the independence of the German judiciary in making decisions from the bench is guaranteed through constitutional principles, statutory remedies, and institutional traditions that have been observed in the past fifty years. At times, however, the tensions inherent in this organizational framework become noticeable and allegations of undue executive influence are made.
You're completely on the wrong track here. The discussion is not about who does or doesn't control the courts, it's about the question if someone who's rights have been violated can go to court or not with regard to that specific matter. If a court rules that blocking an IP address is illegal, the access provider has to stop blocking it. Period.
The CUII does not need a verdict to enact censorship. Make of that what you will.
The police doesn't need a verdict to issue you a fine either. But you can challenge your fine (and your block) in court.
A fine doesn't cause immediate harm as you don't have to immediately pay it while you challenge it in court, having your IP or website blocked happens immediately and will continue harming you until it's decreted that it wasn't lawful.
Challenging the IP bans in Italy is stupidly hard. Your VM gets an IP address that was used a few months ago for soccer piracy? Too bad, you won't be able to access it from Italy.
Surely there's some EU trade barriers law about that
1. CCUI isn't even a government body
2. parent comment is wrong, CCUI is requiring court action by their members before they act.
3. I rather have companies competing under market pressure to find solutions to topics like copyright infringement than the German state (once again) creating massive surveillance laws and technical infrastructure for their enforcement in -house.
2 is wrong. The CUII even blocks political activists because they dare to post their entire blocklist [1]
[1]: https://lina.sh/blog/telefonica-sabotages-me
Read the post, they never blocked the activist. They just changed what they replied to a DNS query of an already blocked site to make it harder to detect.
1. Article you've shared is from 2025-02-26 2. New rules have been in place from 2025-07 3. The author hasn't been blocked at all. You're either a liar or you cannot read.
Are you really countering an argument against censorship by a power abusing entity with another group famous for power abuse?
No.
So is this similar to the DCMA in the US, where there's a lot of iffyness about abuse and actually knowing that someone is actually a rights holder?
At least with DMCA you so get a notice and you can somewhat challenge it. With Italy's Piracy Shield you have no notice and there's no public record of which IPs/websited have been blocked, so it's hard to even challenge it in court.
Nothing prevents anyone from sending in a fake notice anonymously, which will still force any provider to take down your content until challenged.
Not really, this is at a World level. Italy wants to ban an IP globally in 30 minutes.
DMCA take downs are domain specific with one provider. So scale is completely different here.
I agree with this sentiment. His tweet was quite disingenuous and it doesn’t help that he’s tagging Musk and Vance. The noise they make about free speech is a charade.
I still can’t understand why these tech CEOs are doing so many cynical things even in places where they have the chance to start healthy debate.
It’s so frustrating.
Is this similar to what happened in Spain?
yes, it's quite similar. They blocked some lawful services too such as google drive (yes, really) and a TON of sites behind cloudflare by blocking some of its IPs (it happened a while ago, it's not directly related to this).
It's in a way related because this is also meant to combat "football streaming piracy", the same as in Spain. Idiot moves.
I would like to see a similar rant about the DMCA from US CEOs, which amounts to similar global effect. Not a great law but all this censorship stuff is bullshit.
To replicate the rant: Cloudflare on the otherhand blocks me regularly from using the Internet using a privacy aware browser because I fail to pass their bot checks so that I can enter their CDN based replica of a real internet.
To be fair big tech did do a full court press to stop site blocking when such a law (SOPA/PIPA) was proposed in the US, and they continue to oppose the MPA's attempts to get site blocking via the courts. DMCA on the other hand seems very broken, don't give the MPA the "3 strikes" regime they want and you get sued into the ground like Cox. I suspect tech CEOs don't complain about this because they don't want the same treatment.
AFAIK, the DMCA doesn't require infrastructure providers (ISPs, DNS resolvers, "relay" services like Cloudflare) to block entire websites. It's just for surgical removals of content (and blocking of ISP / hosting provider customers who are notorious infringers).
The US doesn't have the kind of website blocking laws that many European countries have.
If you look at those 'whole websites' it is nearly exclusively sites that do not comply with takedown requests regarding copyright (actually those blocking laws/procedures do mostly foresee any other reason). The question I was addressing is the judicial control and the abuse for censorship. DCMA takedown request are massively abused without any real judicial control. Sure you can fight those in court, but so you could fight ISP blocks. I thing the different methods simply stem from a different legal system with different types of fines (particularly in civil law)
Also Italian. I think everybody sucks here?
Most Italian authorities like this one are chock full of incompetents, and I'm almost sure they're just caving in to some soccer broadcaster or some crap like that. He might very well be fully correct on the fact of the matter.
Still, the rhetoric of the post is frankly disgusting. No, I'm not taking lessons in democracy from JD Vance, thank you very much. No, I don't think that might makes right and it's unsurprising that those who believe otherwise are so eager to transparently suck up to this administration.
Making public threats in this way is just vice signaling, nice bait.
But might does make rights.
Because all it takes is men with guns to change what rights you think you have.
If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights.
This is the Stephen Miller caveman view of the world, but it obviously doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than five seconds. It's a very straightforward consequence of refusing to ever admit you are wrong. "If I did it, then I must have had the right to do it."
It's just a refusal to accept the philosophical concept of rights. The right to vote doesn't exist because you didn't have to defeat the entire army to vote against their leader, it's just that the leader benevolently decided to let you vote against them. You don't have the right to life, it's just that everyone on the planet with a weapon has coincidentally decided not to murder you, for now. Laws don't actually exist. Any right that appeared to be established against the wishes of the men with guns (i.e. all of them) was actually fake or an inexplicable accident. You can imagine a world that works like this, but it certainly isn't our world. No historical period or even any fictional story I can think of operates like this.
Refusing to accept the philosophical concept of rights is just correct. You are born with fuck all unless people have decided you are entitled to something by existing. Plenty of people were born without anything remotely resembling rights. If rights were inherent and not simple enforced by people, that wouldn't be the case, would it? Life isn't a fairy tail.
Civilization is literally built on what you're saying being wrong.
It's not wrong because of physics or biology, but because civilization made it so.
Like so many cultural achievements, it's true when you can count on the person next to you expecting it to be true. (1)
Which in turn means you can make that culture collapse if you impress enough people with your edgelord attitude.
Cooperative culture is fragile and must be preserved by preserving shared values such as these. On the other hand, in the long run, the cultures that do this successfully prevail because cooperation is stronger than the law of the jungle.
Unfortunately that 'long run' may take a while.
(1) That's basically the definition of a cultural value. They're emergent phenomena based on Keynesian beauty contests.
Yes, and people have decided I'm entitled to something by existing. That's what human society and civilization is built on. It's been true for the entire history of our species.
> The right to vote doesn't exist because you didn't have to defeat the entire army to vote against their leader,
I would say you're wrong. The right to vote does exist because men rose up together and fought leaders that wouldn't let them vote. And, when leaders rise up that take our right to vote and we don't stop them they will prevail.
> it's just that everyone on the planet with a weapon has coincidentally decided not to murder you, for now.
Correct. Start up a big disaster where food goes away for some reason and it comes back.
We have a stable world where we don't kill each other at the moment because in general we all have food, water, shelter, and I would say enough entertainment that fighting each other isn't worth the risk. There is no rule that says this will last forever. Quite often in history there have been stable times, that then fell apart because of greed and malice of leaders.
I am not saying it's impossible for rights to be taken away, I am arguing against this statement:
> If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights.
I do not own a gun and I have no fighting skills, so I cannot defend myself against men with guns. Would you agree that I therefore have no rights?
I think that you and the original poster are seeing the situation "you are vulnerable to potentially losing rights in the future", which is true, but conflating that with "you have no rights". It's like telling a rich person "you actually don't have any money" because it's possible they might be robbed someday.
Philosophically, no. Practically, no, as long as someone desires and is able to defend them, otherwise yes.
>Would you agree that I therefore have no rights?
You have the right to vote, if you lose that right, and you don't have a gun after that you have whatever 'rights' that are provided to you by a dictator.
One of the things you're missing here is the idea of herd immunity. While you won't fight for your rights, theoretically someone else will making taking your rights dangerous. Once enough people won't fight for their rights, or enough of the population gathers together to take your rights, you lose your rights.
I believe that in this conversation one party is saying that people have intrinsic rights (see the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and the other party might agree on that but they say that those rights can be enforced only if they can be defended. Example: both parties probably agree that people have a right to free speech but nevertheless people end up in jail if they attempt free speech on the wrong subject in the wrong country.
> but it obviously doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than five seconds.
Maduro would disagree.
> it obviously doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than five seconds. [...] It's just a refusal to accept the philosophical concept of rights.
Or it's an attempt to reconcile the philosophical concept of rights with global politics and observed reality.
Does an Afghan girl have a right to education? A Uyghur Muslim a right to freedom of religion? A Palestinian a right to food? A Hong Kong resident a right to freedom of expression?
It would appear that in these cases, the politicians commanding the loyalty of the men with guns do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.
Of course, that's not the only reasonable line of thinking. Just because people in distant lands don't have certain rights in practice, I have those rights because I live in a great country with strong institutions and the rule of law.
> Because all it takes is men with guns to change what rights you think you have.
Plenty folks of didn't / don't change their minds about what rights they thought they had/have, even in the face of guns. Just look at what's currently going in Iran.
If you're in the US, and believe in your own Constitution, then people have "unalienable Rights" that are "endowed by their Creator", regardless of whether they are recognized by the government or not:
* https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I...
You're conflating rights with freedoms, which is the same category error as confusing legality with morality.
Your rights are, by their nature inalienable. They are recognized (or not) by individual power structures, granting you freedoms.
Under an authoritarian regime, your freedoms maybe be limited, for example, your right to free speech may be curtailed by men with guns. Killing those men is illegal, but not unethical, exactly because they are infringing your rights.
This all may seem academic to the person with a boot on their throat, but it dictates how outsiders view one's actions.
> If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights.
My sister is wheelchair bound with MS. Half the time she can barely see. You can give her all the guns you want and she isn't going be to able to defend herself. I reject your nonsense assertion that because of this she has no rights.
race to the bottom logic
this kind of logic will always lead to everyone losing in the long run. always. there will always be a more powerful bully that steps up to take over. history is very clear on this one.
You might be conflating description with prescription.
Descriptively, powerful people have all the rights and weak people have none. This is what we observe in the world. No amount of philosophical thought outweighs actual observations. For example, Donald Trump has (retroactively!) the right to r**e ch*ldren. We know this because he is not suffering consequences for doing that. But Renee Good did not have a right to free speech. We know this because she was executed because of her speech.
You can prescribe whatever fancy academia language you want, but the facts in the real world don't seem to currently support any of it beyond "might makes rights".
Ok. So a man with a gun has the right to shoot you and kill you. Then a policeman comes with a bigger gun and he has the right to kidnap the murderer. Then comes a judge with an even bigger gun (the law) and has the right to lock him up in a prison. But then the murderer gets hold of a weapon and he has the right to escape from prison. Etc.
You see that this view doesn't go very far.
How are all those guns helping in the US right now, as it turns authoritarian?
Pretty good, thanks for asking!
I’m confused. I thought the guns were for stopping an authoritarian regime?
I'll cut the cheekiness, I disagree with a "authoritarian regime". I don't support everything, but to some up an entire government as "authoritarian regime" is wrong IMO.
So why would I use my guns again?
Might can defend, or violate, rights, but it does not make them.
What does make them? Children apparently don't have them, and many races in many countries didn't have them for a long time either. How do you account for that? Are we now distinguishing between "having" rights and uh... being allow to use them?
You can go back to the ancient Greeks to explain what is wrong about that.
Literally two thousand years of civilization were spent on combating the pockets in which people live by that principle.
> No, I'm not taking lessons in democracy from JD Vance, thank you very much
You are falling into a trap where you can not recognize a true point because it is made by someone you disagree with. I don't condone Vance or the Trump admin. He is right about European governemnt's attacks on free speech.
And you are falling into the trap of thinking that if a person is busy deconstructing what used to be one of the larger democracies in the world that their other words are going to be taken at face value, which obviously is not going to happen.
We're not discussing Pol Pot's views on cooking either, even though he might have had some valuable insight. Bringing up Vance and Musk in polite conversation to bolster your argument is - especially in the context of Europe, which both men seem to have declared to be enemy #1 before Russia and China - a little tone deaf.
To be fair, he's not bringing them up as intellectual support for his argumentative base – he's bringing them up as support for acts of retaliation. This is mostly about power and we've lost 30% in power vs. the US in just ~12 years because we've fucked up our economy.
Maybe 'the economy' is not the only valid yardstick to compare countries by?
I absolutely and 100% agree! But it's the stick that others will use to force their world view down your throat. So if you want to be not only righteous, but also hold others accountable according to your standards, you need the economic power to do so.
> we've lost 30% in power vs. the US in just ~12 years because we've fucked up our economy.
I wonder how many Americans would prefer to live in the US that existed 12 years ago versus the US today.
People will say anything online, but when it comes to action very little. I'd rather live in the US now or 12 years ago vs Italy unless someone gave me a tuscan villa with a pool
Virtue signaling at its finest.
I laughed. Im at a the tail end of 3 weeks in Italy, sitting on a train.
Compared to 20 years ago it’s so much cleaner, quicker, more efficient, friendlier.
You must be in a great place as it’s fantastic here.
Oh I've been multiple times, it's beautiful! But vacationing is not living + working, paying bills, dealing with bureaucracy or culture clashes, etc...
Most of our power loss is from electing a belligerent dumb fuck twice and allowing him to sabotage our international relationships and destroying our remaining credibility.
I was speaking about Europe as a whole. Economically, we suck. Losing UK didn't help, either, but except for Poland, we've become relatively poorer by an insane amount, compared to the US. Another 10 years on that path and we're half the US.
What power loss? OP is talking about Italian power loss?
> And you are falling into the trap of thinking that if a person is busy deconstructing what used to be one of the larger democracies in the world that their other words are going to be taken at face value, which obviously is not going to happen.
No. I'm identifying this one statement as factual, regardless of the person saying it. Surely then, you would not deny the color of the sun to be yellow just because Pot might have observed it to be that way?
That's besides the point: JD Vance and Musk are precisely the wrong entities to have opinions on stuff like this because they are on the wrong side of that line most of the time. Especially Musk, but Vance has his own ulterior motives to berate the EU on anything so regardless of the outcome it will be tainted.
> JD Vance and Musk are precisely the wrong entities to have opinions on stuff like this because they are on the wrong side of that line most of the time. Especially Musk, but Vance has his own ulterior motives to berate the EU on anything so regardless of the outcome it will be tainted.
People focus on Vance in this issue because they hate him and hate is easy to come by. They ignore that popular Democrats and progressives said the same thing. Hell, even the Atlantic posted a piece about the issue.
People focus on Vance because he's the one referenced in the tweet.
And most of the online world do not like him, so here we are.
If it was someone else, we'd all be cheering because the person is on a different team.
No, I think that's not the reason. Not at all.
>they are on the wrong side of that line most of the time.
To you, yes. Which shows your biases.
It has been very clear that the Trump adminstrations definition of freedom of speech, including JD Vance's, is that you should be free to say whatever the Trump administration wants and nothing else.
They have consistently prosecuted, threatened, deported, withheld money from, and so on people who say things they do not like.
Similar to what Democrats have done to Trump: https://nypost.com/2024/05/12/us-news/fareed-zakaria-doubts-...
Do you really see it as the same scale?
The judiciary and both houses are allowing some incredible things, far beyond anything from the last administration.
This year has been off to a wild start and it’s well into uncharted territory.
And the answer to that is to point out the hypocrisy (what you're doing), not to take the opposite view, that censorship is important (what so many others are doing when Trump takes a position on anything).
Yes! That is it!
you are falling into the trap of ignoring the pandering. cloudflare bro is clearly pandering here and showing that, in the moment, he will say/do whatever to whomever to get what he wants. cloudflare kind of has a history of doing this.
there was zero reason to name drop vance and elon besides appealing to their rabid fans to bolster support.
it's just more hypocrisy.
What other option do they have? It’s either comply with unjust rulings that undermine the free internet (and their business) or make a deal with the devil. Either one is bad but only complying has an immediate negative impact.
If there was any sense that this ruling was just a temporary mistake that will be corrected by pending regulation/legislation, then a third option would be on the table: temporarily comply and wait it out. But all indications are that the EU is hell-bent on making things worse, not better, for the open internet.
Cloudflare, the company that regularly blocks me from legitimately visiting websites because their bot detection software absolutely sucks probably is the biggest effective censor on the planet.
The AI generated art is also disgusting. Makes the CEO look like an angry kid because his multi-billion dolar industry got a 1% income fine, which is nothing for them, for a service they provide that keeps having outages because they have bad coders who thought moving their shit code to Rust was a good idea.
>as usual, a law was created without verifying how the implementation of such law would work in practice (something very common in Italy), and this is the result.
This is everywhere.
The reason is you DONT want a law to be too detailed with tech mumbo jombo. If too detailed, it will get outdated. See that USA crypto wars ban in the 90s.
I recently learned that Poland literally has a law on the books[1] (from the executive, not the legislative), mandating our use of SOAP and WSDL. You're definitely right on that score. As far as I know, it's supported by some EU directive or other, no less.
[1] (Polish) https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=WDU20240...
He says that JD Vance and Elon Musk believe in free speech, so I’m inclined to conclude that he’s far beyond reason.
And I think that when you are so far biased in one direction there is nothing these two could do to alter your opinion in anyway. Thus making it irrelevant to the discussion.
se non del tutto giusto, quasi niente sbagliato :)
Why would you be inclined to think that?
Why? Because tech companies have shown to bbe honest and transparent? Because their flouting of the law has ever been anything but extreme self interest?
FFS Grok is openly a revenge porn and CSAM generator. These aren’t good people and they aren’t the sort we want as champions of speech because they are not interested in anything but their own profits.
I also wonder why he felt emboldened to escalate like this. Maybe he thinks Italy is so small it can be slapped around by a rage post on Twitter?
There's a DNS blocklist from media industry applied by German ISPs and I assume Cloudflare was also asked to block these websites, so why didn't I read a story about Cloudflare making a big stir about the German DNS blocking?
> There's a DNS blocklist from media industry applied by German ISPs
By the CUII with no judicial oversight. German organizations like the CCC and free speech activists very much hate that this is a thing.
Posting it a hundred times doesn't make your claim more correct. If your rights are infringed, you can always go to court. If you think you being blocked from accessing certain information is an infringement of Art. 2 Abs. 1 GG ("Every person shall have the right to free development of his personality [...]"), you can drag this to The Federal Constitutional Court.
No I can't, since I lack the monetary funds. My claim stands correct, going to the federal constitutional court is expensive enough that many people are barred from that option. My claim stands correct - no judicial verdict is needed for the CUII to censor websites. Don't believe me. Believe the activists [1].
[1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-cuii-wie-konzerne-heimlich-webse...
new comment: you're so wrong that not even the opposite of your statement would be true. CUII is a private body, but it forces its members to go to court before they ask CUII to initiate a block:
Jede DNS-Sperre einer strukturell urheberrechtsverletzenden Webseite (SUW) wird im Rahmen der CUII gerichtlich überprüft.
Das ist freiwillige Selbstverpflichtung der CUII-Mitglieder. Denn eigentlich besteht kein Richtervorbehalt für die Sperransprüche nach § 8 Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz (DDG). Aus diesem Grund sind auch die DNS-Sperren nach dem alten Verhaltenskodex mit behördlicher Beteiligung zulässig gewesen (Siehe Fragen: “Was verändert sich durch den neuen Verhaltenskodex der CUII?” und “Warum gab es zum Juli 2025 - nach jahrelanger Arbeit - einen Systemwechsel in der CUII?”).
old comment: CUII is not a governmental body so what the hell should they need a court order for when doing the thing that their members pay them to do? If your not happy with your internet access provider being a member of CUII, switch your internet access provider. I agree that CUII should publish a list of blocked domains as part of transparent communication and proving that they are doing a good job.
Why should a private entity control what people see online?
Why should you - a private entity - control what content other people have to serve you?
ISPs act as gatekeepers for essential information. When they control what flows, they’re effectively regulating speech.
Yes, I didn't want to say it is a good thing.
If the German filters only apply to ISPs in Germany, they have no effect on users in foreign countries. Moreover, Cloudflare is obviously not an ISP.
the filters the Italian authorities complain about also only apply in italy.
It's likely a process thing, Italy has had website bans since forever, but the new regulation applies _without going through a judge_. Some copyright holders can say "this website is infringing" and ISPs, CDNs etc.. are required to shut them down immediately.
A similar system was introduced in Spain, with the same problems, for the same reason (football $$$).
EDIT: to be clear, CF argues that they need to block the DNS globally, and that's unreasonable. The Italian authority argues that they have the skills to do a local block and are just being uncooperative.
> EDIT: to be clear, CF argues that they need to block the DNS globally, and that's unreasonable. The Italian authority argues that they have the skills to do a local block and are just being uncooperative.
Similar to the UK's attempt to try and get noncompliant sites like Imgur and 4chan to block themselves from serving content to UK locations, I think the responsibility for country-wide blocks lies with the country attempting to regulate the space, not CDNs or websites.
I don't doubt that Italy is correct that CF has the technical ability do a local block like they're asking for, but I also don't see how CF is in any way (legally) compelled to do so. Whether or not Italy (or any country) is capable of doing so, or paying contractors for an appropriate solution, isn't CF's problem either.
The difference is that Imgur/4chan have no presence in the UK but Cloudflare has servers and probably a sales office in Italy. Cloudflare does have to follow Italian law within Italy.
Either Cloudflare can block pirate sites or ISPs will completely block Cloudflare (as seen in Spain). Which way do you prefer?
> The Italian authority argues that they have the skills to do a local block
they certainly do, they have the source IP and their platform lets them geolocate an ip
Do you think the Italian bureaucrats really want to ban something in France or Germany?
The Cloudflare CEO is clearly misinterpreting something that was lost in translation, which is the bureaucrats stating "Cloudflare must prevent access to XY from everywhere". For bureaucrats "everywhere" means "in my jurisdiction". I cannot believe that the Cloudflare CEO is trying to nitpick around a single word that he so clearly misinterprets.
> Do you think the Italian bureaucrats really want to ban something in France or Germany?
Yes 100% they absolutely do.
I'm pretty sure Cloudflare is an ISP according to German law ("Diensteanbieter" according to DDG). You might confuse "ISP" with the terminology of "Access Provider" according to the (now defunct) §8 TMG.
If that were true, sci-hub.se would be blocked in Germany on 1.1.1.1 (1dot1dot1dot1.cloudflare-dns.com), it isn't blocked, therefore it's not true. (Modus tollens)
Your reasoning is impeccable, bravo. But it's wrong. Both your premise and your conclusion are based on completely wrong assumptions.
Not sure which premise you disagree with, but the conclusion follows from them.
I am a Service Provider ("Diensteanbieter") according to DDG and I don't block a single page, which makes your statement not only wrong, but rather so wrong that not even the complete opposite would make any sense.
What is the escalation? Cloudflare or any company is free to stop doing business in any country which mistreats them or doesn't align with their interest. How can you interpret this in some way as Cloudflare being the aggressor? They don't owe the nation of Italy anything.
Regardless of whether the law is absurd or not (I honestly have no idea, but we've seen some crazy stuff lately in the EU), its kinda precious that a CEO only complains about it when his company is fined.
I'm certain it is also quite reassuring for any paying Cloudflare customer that the company strategy is driven by the CEO Twitter rants; That if by some reason doesn't want to play ball with local laws (as draconian as they may be) and the company is fined, his public reaction is threatening to leave the country. Its not the first time he does this, and certainly it won't be the last. This communication style gets old fast, and IMO this actually hurts the company - I'm a free tier user and would never subscribe any paid products. I think their tech is amazing, they surely have great engineers, but I don't feel comfortable financing a company that thinks it is above the law.
The icing on the cake is the plea for a free internet; You know what a free internet looks like? A network that doesn't make half its content inaccessible because someone in a major company did a mistake on a SQL query. Or a network that isn't controlled by a company that basically just said "we're tight with the US government, so f** your laws".
He did mention that they were fighting the law before they were fined and they plan to challenge the fine in court. He has also been vocal about other similar legislation before they were enacted or the company got fined (not sure about this specific one though).
So I don't think it's fair to characterize it as he "only complains about it when his company is fined".
He also said this:
> In the meantime, we remain happy to discuss this with Italian government officials who, so far, have been unwilling to engage beyond issuing fines.
which, although his rant really pisses me off, further proves your point.
He's giving Italy and Italians fair warning that he will abandon the Italian market to avoid being subject to their laws, and I think it will go that way. I guess it's up to the Italians to find a replacement.
Find a replacement global edge network and get the rest of the world to use it?
Can't have a global edge network without also being a big player - something Cloudflare is disliked for. You're suggesting everyone move to a new provider, so we can dislike the new vendor instead?
At least 2 major competitors have good enough global edge networks.
Why does his rant piss you off?
Likely because it mentions JD Vance and the current US administration in a positive light, since they have rightly shone a bright light on the active decline of free speech in Europe.
Thanks for answering for me but you got it wrong. Believe it or not other people can be as nuanced as the CEO of Cloudflare.
Curious, why does his rant piss you off?
I've had the pleasure of working for CEOs who don't resort to public threats (or all caps) to get their point across. When I chose who leads me or who I work with stability and consistency are key. This just sounds like a man who thinks he can flex his way out of a problem and that is just such a short sited way to solve problems. Not my kind of CEO.
> financing a company that thinks it is above the law
I've never liked arguments like this, because laws are often complex, unreasonable, and unjust, and all of us (both individuals and companies) routinely use our best judgment to decide which laws to flout and which to follow, and when, where, and why to do so.
I share that perspective. Being an international company is a challenging thing regards law. You have to operate in best intent, and judges respect that.
And sure, some laws and most likely this one, are stupid. I always take GDPR as an example. Annoying as fuck, but a good regulation. Well written, well executed and hits its goal.
However, disrespecting and being tone deaf in communication is wrong, ignoring the intent (Italian based legal control of IP violations) is wrong and treating the Internet as a legal free space (or only accept US perspective) is wrong. Italy is a sovereign state and the Internet is operating there and on its citizens. It has all right and duty to do so. We have to respect that.
It feels good to see someone give a giant middle finger to corruption.
A giant middle finger to corruption by sucking up the most corrupt government the US has ever seen?
I don't know if you read the tweet? Maybe give it another go.
I did. It reads exactly the same. Suck up to the current US government.
Did Matthew donate to the Trump ballroom yet?
> And sure, some laws and most likely this one, are stupid. I always take GDPR as an example. Annoying as fuck, but a good regulation. Well written, well executed and hits its goal.
It's funny people normally use GDPR as an example of a law so poorly written and implemented that the sites of the very EU governments that passed it are still not in compliance a decade later.
For real. Laws likee anti-circumvention laws are a horrible plague on humanity. There's all kinds of nonsense & so often businesses have far too much sway or outright grasp over the legal system.
You can't be a hacker without having any Question Authority backbone or will. You don't have to be full onboard but very few nations seem capable of behaving at all reasonably when it comes to technology. And few even have the chance to do right: American corporate empire has insisted countries adopt particularly brutal ip laws for decades, and made trade contingent upon it.
The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace & Doctorow's recent talk on the EU needing their own break for Cyberspace & IP Independence are both important revealing materials here. https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46420951 https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
Style aside, what do you think he should do? Faced with a law that not only imposes disproportionate fines (more than revenue from the country), but on the surface also requires blocking globally, there are really only a few things to do:
1. Challenge the law in court
3. Influence the law via political means
3. Try to sway public opinion so 2. may be easier
4. Give in and play ball
5. Exit the country entirely
> Challenge the law in court
Do the courts in Italy work or do they do what the govt wants them to do.
The government complains everyday about the judges and it's trying to make a referendum to make judges angry, so I wouldn't say courts do what govt says
Yes, the judiciary is an independent branch in Italy, alongside the executive and the legislative.
What did the other major companies do?
It looks like he skipped 1 and 2 and went straight for option 3. I wonder why that is.
how ever did you reach that conclusion? For 1, his tweet literally says "That, of course, is DISGUSTING and even before yesterday’s fine we had multiple legal challenges pending against the underlying scheme." 2 is something that happens behind the doors, and it's rather uncharitable to just assume he skipped it.
That's fair, but he also didn't give any specifics. If Cloudflare is suing Italy there should be some documents we can read.
When I read this I was thinking that I'd be grateful for the CEO of a company I worked for to write this.
As long as they don't go off the rails like Musk and others have, its good to see them pasionate and fight for the company. The reverse is MUCH worse.
This 1000x times!
What is an example of a crazy law from EU?
https://fightchatcontrol.eu
Agreed. But to be fair, the proposal was rejected.
The fact that it was even proposed in the first place is still concerning.
It wasn't, it passed on the Council of EU.
Not for long, seemingly.
Effective ban of GMOs across EU, ban on paternity tests in France without a court order are the two that come to mind for me.
What does the French law have to do with the EU?
Example of a crazy law within the EU
Crying free speech and attempting to rile up the tech bros is just what companies do these days.
It doesn't matter if, like this issue, it has absolutely nothing to do with free speech; if you position yourself as a defender of the "open internet", "open source", "free thinking" or "innovation" you get every dingleberry that hangs off Musk to come and defend you.
American free speech as of 2026 includes openly threatening to invade European territory unless it is given away.
It's funny how America can force it's own crappy content protection laws to the entire globe, but another country can't have their own.
The current administration is burning good will to America with it's allies at an alarming rate. This isn't good for stability or world order. I think this year is could be a contender to be the worst one yet of this millennium as we find other despots empowered by America's actions.
> I don't feel comfortable financing a company that thinks it is above the law
Of all the companies to make that claim about in 2026, Cloudflare would not be very high on the list I would think... Also, hopefully you're not paying for any genAI services and making that statement?
The appeal to JD Vance is properly craven and validates the view that their business model is effectively a protection racket.
Recall the unsavoury episode with taviso, when they lobbied the FTC to investigate him after he helped clean up their mess during Cloudbleed. They always pivot to aggression when challenged.
> when they lobbied the FTC to investigate him
FYI Cloudflare didn't actually do that: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1566160152684011520
(Disclosure: I work at Cloudflare but have no personal involvement with this.)
Right. I guess we’ll have to take his word for it.
Not sure if my word is any better but I wouldn't be working for him if I thought he was the kind of person who harasses security researchers.
> The appeal to JD Vance is properly craven and validates the view that their business model is effectively a protection racket.
It's not craven, it's a mistake. It needlessly antagonizes the market at large to solve a smaller problem. I don't see how this benefits Cloudflare in the long run unless they've decided to throw in their lot with the current US regime. If so, what happens when that regime changes?
How is CFs business model a protection racket?
JD Vance business is a protection racket. That is how I read it
I mean I dislike JD Vance as much as the next guy, but I don't see how it's unreasonable to appeal to the federal government for assistance in dealing with international legal issues. That's very much in the government's remit.
Lawyers are for legal issues.
Do you call your government if you get a fine in a foreign country?
Unless it’s life threatening I doubt that.
You do when the fine is more than double your annual revenue in the foreign nation, has international and geopolitical implications, impacts many other US businesses, could harm foreign relations, and will harm regular US citizens.
That's exactly the type of thing the Executive Branch is supposed to deal with.
Executive branch is supposed to deal with other countries' laws and courts? Does it also hold for European executive branches and American laws? I don't want to even imagine a world that works like this.
> Does it also hold for European executive branches and American laws?
Yes, if a US law is overreaching and directly impacting people in the EU. That is literally how the world works in practice so I'm not sure what to tell you.
CLOUD act is overreaching and impacting people in the EU. What EU governments are doing is avoiding US-based cloud services for critical applications, because it's an US law, not a European one
It’s called diplomacy.
"I don't like your laws, and we're bigger!"
You're just describing the concept of realpolitik. This is how the world works.
Do people not understand that companies on this scale are geopolitically important?
Thank they should act like it and respect the laws of the countries.
If you run to the US executive to assert US understanding of law onto other countries you are geopolitical important, however, as a tool for the US national interest not as a true international company. A true international company would serve their customers in their legal systems. Fight the laws there, try to make them better, but don't strongarm them with other country forces. They are a sovereign country.
When a country is trying to impose extra-territorial laws, then it goes beyond enforcing their sovereignty, and it is completely reasonable for the affected to request diplomatic intervention.
Surely I don't need to point out the irony of complaining to the US government about another country wanting to impose extraterritorial laws?
It would be nice if we had an international agreement on how to apply sovereignity on the internet without infinging on sovereignity of other countries. US would be in a great position to initiate this if the current administration had any understanding of what "international agreement", "sovereignity" or "other countries" means.
Well the law is surely addressing European/Italian citizens and business. If you serve them from the US and target Italians for financial gain, you are no longer extraterritorial because you operate there as a business.
You mean like the US with it's sanctions that prevent European countries getting payments per credit card or Paypal when they sell Cuban products?
Has Trump considered bombing Italy and kidnapping Meloni yet?
Italy should have no right to take a website off the internet globally, which from what I’ve read this allows them to do. That’s insane.
They have all right to sanction or restrict a company which has a legal footprint in their territory.
When you are incorporating as a company in a country you are subject to their laws. Period. If that includes rules how you act worldwide, than that is a part of it.
Do not get me wrong, restricting free speech or apply IP law outside your territory is IMHO not right for a country to do.
Why would Italy pick Cloudflare over Bunny.net or even CDNetworks if Cloudflare can't follow their laws? Today US tech products sell well in Europe because of the past 80 years of positive relationships. So Cloudflare is the obvious choice over CDNetworks, but for how long will it be like that?
Maybe that's the way it is in the US, because the country is run by corporations. But in the rest of the world we don't operate like that.
The Italians obviously don't
Geopolitical important companies are a bad thing. Imagine the company being an Iranian or North Korean company.
That's one countries leverage against another countries laws.
I mean, that's an argument for making them respect your country's laws or banning them from your country if they don't want to.
They're not.
When the risks are too high, then exit the market. When you do business in a market, adhere to the laws there.
It is however the business of governments to foster harmonized (globalized) markets. But the US has killed so many regulations and collaborations in the last year, that there is little hope that this will improve any time soon. They do not want globalization anymore but American first. Reactions of other countries will be higher fines, more regulation and higher entry barriers.
> When the risks are too high, then exit the market. When you do business in a market, adhere to the laws there.
And when you want help to improve your terms of trade, you can petition your government to assist.
> It is however the business of governments to foster harmonized (globalized) markets.
It is the business of governments to further the interests and wishes of their people.
> But the US has killed so many regulations and collaborations in the last year, that there is little hope that this will improve any time soon.
Is Italy's actions here fostering "harmonized (globalized) markets", I wonder?
> They do not want globalization anymore but American first.
If globalization is what Americans want, then that is what their government should be accommodating. If it's not, then the government should not.
Even if "the experts" think something is right or wrong, even if some economic factor or other might objectively improve with a particular policy, it should be up to the people to decide. Self-determination is one of the most fundamental human rights there is, too often ignored by the ruling class.
Well first off, generally if you are arrested in another country you would in fact call your government. Most people do this, and it'd be foolish not to. If you get sued for a large amount of money or defrauded or face any number of other issues, also reasonable to call your government.
Anyway, not a great comparison because you're talking about legal regulations governing speech on the internet. This isn't a jaywalking ticket, it's a deeply complex regulatory issue involving politics, law and international relations. It's also an issue that the current administration has shown interest in, so if you're an affected American business it would be pretty foolish not to seek help there.
I’m not sure whose business model you’re referring to, Cloudflare or Trump/Vance? Or sounds like the former, but I’m not sure how that appeal “validates the view…”.
He's very likely being defensive.
while the spirit of your statement is clear , i dont think its 'properly craven' to recognise both an individual's faults and their strengths - in this case the author goes to lengths to state he does not necessarily agree with either musk or vance. has anybody successfully recieved protection from this US administration while acknowledging fault of said administration ? from outside this doesnt seem likely as US politics is currently operating like team sports (ie. no tolerance of toeing party lines, 'youre either with us or against us')
Not a good look on that guy to list his "pro-bono" services and threaten to pull them while asking JD Vance for his help.
How is he expecting the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics to influence some representative of media right holders who have fined Cloudflare? Is he assuming that just because all of the listed things are Italian they can just make the fine go away?
This is taking place in a larger geopolitical context. He is applying whatever pressure that Cloudflare can apply on its own (not much), and he mentions Vance as a way to call for US administration help at a time when the US is entering an open economic conflict with Europe. Tech and speech regulation is a central feature of that conflict.
IMHO this is a time when there are no good players. I support CF’s fight to keep the internet open against encroaching EU regulation while also acknowledging that the US has been a recurring bad actor here. I am not as anti-Cloudflare as some (I have no problem with their pro free speech policies) but I do think centralization of infrastructure is a bad thing, and CF encourages that.
Wasn't 1.1.1.1 explicitly created to help people in countries with government internet restrictions to get around them?
100% support whatever Cloudflare has to do to win this fight. IMO the timing of something like this in the middle of the Elon + X vs UK censorship fight with the current administration providing support is probably the best case scenario.
People aren't going to want to hear that, but in this case it's probably true.
> Wasn't 1.1.1.1 explicitly created to help people in countries with government internet restrictions to get around them?
No, it was explicitly created to receive and study the stream of "garbage traffic" being sent to 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1, which were previously held by APNIC and donated to Cloudflare on this basis. https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/
> APNIC's research group held the IP addresses 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. While the addresses were valid, so many people had entered them into various random systems that they were continuously overwhelmed by a flood of garbage traffic. APNIC wanted to study this garbage traffic but any time they'd tried to announce the IPs, the flood would overwhelm any conventional network.
> We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. We offered Cloudflare's network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.
By these quotes, it was created to serve "a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system", and the service of help in studying the garbage traffic was offered in exchange for gaining controll of the address(es).
"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
I think this clearly shows the hubris of Cloudflare CEO. Cloudflare is simply not important enough in Europe, and he unnecessarily provided a scapegoat "evil US tech company" for European media and politicians to slaughter. In terms of corporate politics it's not clever for him to attach his name to this issue, why not let legal handle this through EU lobby channels the same way other US tech companies do it in Europe.
Cloudflare should just block Italy altogether.
Add Spain with LaLiga on top too. Inb4 "the CF CEO it's a right winger", so it's the Soccer -LaLiga- CEO.
His hubris isn't news. Remember when he woke up in the middle of the night and blocked some website because he personally didn't like it?
No, haven't heard that story. Can you share a source?
I suspect this is referring to the removal (not block) of The Daily Stormer in 2017[0].
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
Oh, there's also Kiwifarms in 2022: https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/
Was anything of value lost?
Seriously, what good has ever come out of that cess pit.
Yes, that’s a stance that is playing with fire. But is it wrong?
I'm not saying it is. I think there's a pretty broad agreement that those sites are bad, and less of them is good.
It's much less obvious that we want private corporations (or governments) picking and choosing which sites are good or bad. And from Cloudflare's position, a policy of "we don't police content" is more defensible than "we don't police content, except of this one in particular". These definitely aren't the only two horrible, racist websites Cloudflare has hosted.
IIRC (and take this memory with a grain of salt), one thing that angered eastdakota about Stormfront was that they kept saying something like "Cloudflare hasn't kicked us off, so they're okay with us" or something like that. And obviously that doesn't hold water, unless Cloudflare has chosen to kick of some sites, it lends some credence to the remaining ones.
I'm undecided where I stand on it. I'd like them to take actions like this in a principled way. (And I'm happy to accept that there's no clear line to draw, nor that it can be enforced with 100% accuracy, but if you're drawing a line, do it thoughtfully and broadcast it so you know ahead of time if you're in their gray area.)
> the US is entering an open economic conflict with Europe.
Whilst ending swathe of agreements, threatening to end NATO and threatening to attack a NATO territory.
"Tech and speech regulation is a central feature of that conflict"
The only conflict is that Europeans don't want Russian Misinformation and Manipulation from foreign powers onto them. It's no accident that Musks X serves preferentially content from European Far-Right Parties.
The US used the same argument for their TikTok-Ban/Forced Takeover. They also don't make a secret out of their plan to push the far-right to end the EU. They even wrote about this in their new National Security Strategy
Pure Hypocrisy
>They also don't make a secret out of their plan to push the far-right to end the EU.
How is the "far right" gonna end "the EU"? When my GF walks alone at night through the parks she's never EVER afraid of the mythical far right for her safety, but the other people the far left won't let us talk about without being called a label and being cancelled from MSM for having common sense opinions.
So if the EU were to find its end, it will be 100% at the hand of its own making, from years of corruption and financial mismanagement, from years of pushing unpopular open borders far left policies that nobody was asked it they agree with them or not. That's what will end the EU. Not Musk, not X, not Putin, not Trump, but the EU bureaucrats and their unpopular policies who then use boogiemen like X and "russian misinformation" and "far right" as scapegoats to deflect from their failures like this:
Corruption being exposed on X? Must be Russian misinformation. Illegal migrant crime exposed on X. Must be far right misinformation. Epstein Files? Democrat hoax. Etc but you get the point.
Politicians hate accountability and media channels they can't control like X that risk exposing their mistakes and corruption. They want full control of media to tell you what's acceptable to think, since the internet and social media made traditional state controlled media obsolete. They don't want control of social media and user ID verification to "protect the children", they want it to protect themselves from criticism and accountability from you.
It's not Elon's or Trump's or Putin's or the far right's fault the healthcare in my country has been on a decline for 10+ years. It's not their fault wages are stagnating but property prices are skyrocketing which is what most voters care about. That's the fault of the ECB fiscal policies. It's not their fault public safety is down and crime is up. That's the fault of EU border control and irresponsible migration policies. Etc. you get the point.
So it's disingenuous at best and bad faith at worst, to ignore these long going systemic issues the EU has self inflicted on its voters, and just blame the far right for the backlash it has inevitably lead to.
You're making it sound way more dramatic than it is [1]. And yes X is a far right echo chamber that twists the narrative so that the extreme right get the most support out of it. X is the biggest help for foreign power to sow discord among us [2]
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/crime-statistics-knife-crime-drugs-lif...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj38m11218xo
Dissidents are actually all foreign agents.
All hail the EU, comrade!
I'm sure you understand the fact that an alliance of countries is not held together by the absence of serial killers hiding in parks at night, yeah? Europe has rather famous historical knowledge of what the far right can do, and how it can destroy a country, and it has nothing to do with parks at night.
>Europe has rather famous historical knowledge of what the far right can do, and how it can destroy a country
Since you brought up European history, let me ask you where the far right came from in WW2 Europe. Did they just suddenly come out of nowhere and manage to take over a continent just like that without having majority popular support amongst the population? Or was it an organic growth gaining political support feeding off the backlash to failed policies of previous administrations in Europe?
Because history is repeating itself right now and you're either not seeing it because you don't know the answer to the historial question above, or you are ignoring it because you don't like it and you hope the solution lies in draconical measures against far right parties as if that will magically to turn all those displeased citizens to stop supporting far right, and not making it worse by radicalizing them even further leading to more extremism which is what is actually gonna happen.
You're basically creating a self fulfilling prophecy with this attitude of putting all the blame and focus of state failures on the far right.
> and it has nothing to do with parks at night
It 100% has everything to do with that. Because if you import millions of potentially dangerous and culturally incompatible people from dangerous low trust societies into (formerly) safe European high trust societies, against the will of the majority of your voters making them now feel unsafe in their own countries, and you refuse to backtrack on your unpopular policies, then voting far right is the only peaceful and democratic option the voters have to express their displeasure with your policies.
And you can only ignore, ban and suppress the demands of the far right parties for so long, until they become the majority of the voter base, and then you're fucked and the prophecy you were trying to stop fulfills itself, the far right takes power and uses all the political weapons you built to suppress them against you. Just like 80 years ago.
Like I said before, people are doomed to have history repeats itself on themselves because people never learn, or they learn the wrong lessons due to ideological biases giving themselves a false sense of moral superiority over the others they disagree with.
You see this societal failure on HN as well, with my comments here getting flagged even though they didn't break any rules and haven't been factually proven wrong via debate, yet people will reject and try to silence them them without arguments or debate, same as they reject the other views that don't conform to their bubble.
Most of the big names campaigning against immigration are themselves credibly accused of sexual assault. We can see through your mind games.
Even if that is correct. It only means they have enough domestic supply of that kind of person, and there is no need to import more.
> The only conflict is that Europeans don't want Russian Misinformation and Manipulation from foreign powers onto them
People always have reasons for wanting to censor speech.
> Pure Hypocrisy
Ironic.
There is a big difference between right to free speech by citizens of a certain country vs. someone working in the military propaganda unit of a foreign country who artificially amplifies their opinion thousandfold while masquerading as a citizen of the victim country with ultimate goal to harm the victim country.
You are focusing on identity and intent, e.g you are defending the restriction of speech based on who is speaking and why. Knowing the difference between an opinion of an origin you consider valid and one you consider invalid is difficult enough that one can abuse that justification to censor "real" speech by citizens.
Ivan from St. Petersburg calls himself "Heinz Müller" and creates a Telegram group that reports about immigrant crime in my neighborhood, trying to fool elderly citizens with lack of social media experience into believing his fake news stories. It's a proven approach and Ivan's main job. If Ivan would've been born in another country, he simply would've tried to scam elderly citizens, but because he was born in russia he works for the propaganda unit so he doesn't get sent to a meat assault on the frontlines.
In his free time Ivan comes to HN and poses as a free speech absolutist.
> In his free time Ivan comes to HN and poses as a free speech absolutist.
I am not an absolutist, far from it, and I'm pretty sad that you feel the need to resort to personal attacks, even if indirect.
Is there also a progressive woke version of Ivan or is there always only a far right version of him?
Well you see, <my side>'s swarm intelligence is organic and honest and people from <other side> are bots.
Jokes aside, the Harris campaign openly manipulated Reddit to get their opinions on the top [1]. I was there on election night. The entire site slowed to a crawl. Opinions of people you normally never read gained hundreds to thousands of upvotes. It felt organic for exactly one day.
[1]: https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/29/busted-the-inside-story...
If the plan is to sow division, it would be really weird to always only try to play one side. If I was trying to stir division, I would make sure to play all sides for maximum effect. But apparently other commentators here think only one side is being played and its always the same one.
So you are basically arguing that it's hard to distinguish, therefore we shouldn't try. By that logic, we couldn't prosecute fraud because it's sometimes hard to distinguish from aggressive marketing, or couldn't have espionage laws because it's hard to distinguish from journalism.
The distinction isn't about "valid" vs "invalid" opinions, as you framed it, it's just about authenticity and coordination. A Russian citizen genuinely expressing pro Kremlin views on their personal account is exercising speech. A state funded operation running hundreds of fake accounts pretending to be American citizens, artificially amplifying divisive content, is something different, it's basically a form of information warfare.
And what I write here isn't theoretical, coordinated influence operations have inflamed ethnic tensions from the Balkans to Myanmar, not to mention Russian-Ukraininan conflict propaganda. These aren't just "opinions we disagree with", they're documented operations with measurable effects on real world violence. I mean this is a form of war, in which some countries want to destroy your society fabric for their advantage.
Every democracy already makes this distinction in other domains. Foreign governments can't donate to political campaigns. Foreign agents must register when lobbying. Do you call them violations of free speech? They're just acknowledgments that coordinated foreign influence is fundamentally different from citizen discourse.
The difficulty of drawing lines doesn't mean no lines exist.
> So you are basically arguing that it's hard to distinguish, therefore we shouldn't try
No, I said because it's hard to distinguish, therefore we can not use it as an excuse to enact censorship.
> By that logic, we couldn't prosecute fraud
Fraud is illegal.
> couldn't have espionage laws
Espionage is illegal.
No matter what you do or what you write, enacting "desinformation laws" would require a ministry of truth to decide what is fact and what isn't, a task governments are famously incredibly bad at because they always have vested interests in not telling the truth.
> A state funded operation running hundreds of fake accounts pretending to be American citizens, artificially amplifying divisive content, is something different, it's basically a form of information warfare
And yet it is still speech and not distinguishable from genuine Russians sharing their opinions. It is easy to refute the opinions of many a people by discrediting them to be of the origin of a manufactured propaganda machine. Once you start doing this for foreign people, the next logical step is to continue this strategy for local activists or political opponents.
> And what I write here isn't theoretical, coordinated influence operations have inflamed ethnic tensions from the Balkans to Myanmar, not to mention Russian-Ukraininan conflict propaganda. These aren't just "opinions we disagree with", they're documented operations with measurable effects on real world violence. I mean this is a form of war, in which some countries want to destroy your society fabric for their advantage
I know this to be factual. I'm not denying it's existence at all. I'm making a point here. I don't want the government to hold these tools you propose. Any law enacted and every power given will not only be wielded by a government of parties you support, but also at one point by factions you disagree with entirely.
Guess what? Copyright violation is also illegal.
You are all over this thread in god knows how many comments arguing about Germany and world wide censorship whereas this thread - and the fine - is about copyright and Italy. The second they use it for anything else I'll be happy to jump the line but until then they are - for once - using this law as it is intended and it doesn't really matter that there are other unrelated wrongs that you could commit using the same mechanism.
You are jumping back and forth between moral arguments and legalistic arguments.
If your defense for going after fraud and espionage is its illegal, are you fine if a country makes censorship legal?
No. My point is that real people are hurt by fraud and espionage and comparing outlawing those to outlawing speech is inane
I am hurt when I think I am hearing words from a fellow citizen that are their own opinion, when instead it is a foreign actor pushing a narrative for their state.
I am all for free speech, but I am not for anonymous speech which is choking the internet. If I am in person speaking with you, I can be fairly certain that you aren't actually a completely different person underneath a rubber mask. I want to at least know that an account I am speaking to is a _person_ and not a robot, although Id probably want country of origin too.
I do not have a good answer for how to achieve that without having a chilling effect on speech, but maybe that's a good thing? I go back and forth on if its better or not to require you to say who you are if you want to say something in public.
In private, go hog wild.
> I am hurt when I think I am hearing words from a fellow citizen that are their own opinion, when instead it is a foreign actor pushing a narrative for their state.
No you are not.
> I am all for free speech, but I am not for anonymous speech which is choking the internet
Then you are not for free speech. Have you ever considered from your point of view that anonymity is incredibly valuable to people who live under an oppressive regime, like Iran or Russia?
> I want to at least know that an account I am speaking to is a _person_ and not a robot, although Id probably want country of origin too.
I too, want many things. That does not give me the right to unveil people who wish to be anonymous. It's pretty wild that this is an opinion on hacker news, of all sites.
> No you are not.
If you are going to decide my values for me, then there is nothing left to discuss.
The issue I have with your argument is that you're treating inaction as neutral. It isn't. Choosing not to act against coordinated foreign influence operations is itself a choice with consequences. If a hostile state can freely run thousands of fake accounts to inflame divisions, amplify extremism, and erode trust in institutions (and we deliberately tie our hands) then we're not preserving some pristine free speech environment. I mean we're ceding the information space to whoever is willing to manipulate it most aggressively.
The "marketplace of ideas" doesn't function when one participant is a state apparatus with unlimited resources pretending to be thousands of organic voices. Your slippery slope argument applies to laws we already have and accept. Lets take US as an example, the Foreign Agents Registration Act has existed since 1938. Foreign campaign contributions are illegal. These laws require distinguishing foreign influence from domestic speech. By your logic, these should have already devolved into tools of domestic political persecution. Have they? Imperfect enforcement, sure. But "the government of a faction I disagree with might someday abuse this" hasn't been a reason to repeal FARA.
Another issue that I have with your argument is that you've identified risks of action but proposed nothing. What's your actual framework here? If coordinated foreign information warfare is real and harmful, and ongoing (which you acknowledge) what should democracies do? I mean if your answer is "nothing, because any tool could theoretically be abused" then you are not offering any policy, right? but basically you are arguing for resignation.
> The issue I have with your argument is that you're treating inaction as neutral.
The issue I have with your argument is that you're treating action as a necessary evil enacted by a well meaning government. It isn't.
> I mean we're ceding the information space to whoever is willing to manipulate it most aggressively.
I am well aware that this is a difficult thing to solve. What is it then, that you propose we do?
> These laws require distinguishing foreign influence from domestic speech. By your logic, these should have already devolved into tools of domestic political persecution. Have they?
Yes. YES. The FARA has sometimes been applied asymmetrically, especially against individuals or organizations connected to political opponents, lobbyists and think tanks. It is the perfect example for what I mean. The FARA is broadly defined and with a DOJ under an administration, it is prone to misuse. The DOJ under Trump considered to use it to charge Hunter Biden. The identification of "hostile agents" that you argue is necessary is exactly what I mean when I point to government misuse, as the Trump admin is currently using these exact laws to identify activists and nonprofits as domestic terrorists [1]. We have people in this thread decry the Trump administration for their actions and stances on selectively applying free speech while they at the same time argue for more government power even while it is being abused in this very moment. I am aghast at how this is happening.
> Another issue that I have with your argument is that you've identified risks of action but proposed nothing. What's your actual framework here? If coordinated foreign information warfare is real and harmful, and ongoing (which you acknowledge) what should democracies do?
Do what democracy's are already doing. Issue sanctions that hurt. A large amount of LNG and gas imports in Europe are still traceable to Russia. Invest into digital thinking and digital literacy. But that would require putting your money where your mouth is, instead of arguing for those sweet tools of citizen control. Germany spends below average on education and our pupils suffer. The same is true for US education.
Sorry, but I won't argue for controlling a stupid populace when we fail at teaching at the same time. I will give you an example. The censorship tools already exist, at least in Germany, and they are justified and enacted by politicians that cite "studies" from NGOs like Amadeu Antonio, HateAid, Demokratie leben! or NETTZ. All organizations that receive massive funds from the govt that exist only to deliver "proof" and "reasons" for censorship because of "hate" and "misinformation". Of course, these studies [2] are then cited massively [3] by the media aparatus and ultimately the same politicians that paid to have this information produced [4]. Sometime after, the truth may be reveiled [5], the falsified data exposed, but the damage is done and laws are proposed [6] that enable the government to break and enter into journalist offices and media companies and shutting them down without a court order. All in the name of fighting misinformation and saving democracy.
[1]: https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/how-nspm-7-seeks...
[2]: https://hateaid.org/neue-studie-politisch-engagierte-und-dig...
[3]: https://nachrichten.idw-online.de/2025/01/15/neue-studie-dig...
[4]: https://taz.de/Justizministerin-Lambrecht-ueber-NetzDG/!5689...
[5]: https://www.publicomag.com/2020/07/publico-dossierverfolgter...
[6]: https://dserver.bundestag.de/brd/2025/0766-25.pdf
Sanctions haven't stopped Russian influence operations, they've continued under the heaviest sanctions regime in history. I agree that digital literacy is genuinely important, but lets not kid ourselves that we can suddenly make it work tomorrow, it's basically a generational project. Meanwhile, influence operations are happening now, at scale, with measurable effects. So what I mean is that "invest in education" approach is correct but insufficient as a response to an active, ongoing campaign. It's like responding to a house fire by saying we should invest in fire safety education. Your home will burn down while you do this.
So I understand your point but you're essentially arguing that because democracies can abuse power, they should unilaterally disarm against adversaries who face no such constraints. Russia etc have no free speech concerns limiting their operations against us. Doing nothing will allow these adveraries to destroy our democracies from within.That is an endgame of your approach, and I just can't agree with this. So doing nothing because our tools might be misused feels like it guarantees we lose.
I think we can at least agree that the choice isn't only between "government ministry of truth" and "do nothing" and we need a middle ground solution. Transparency requirements (forcing platforms to label state affiliated accounts), requiring disclosure of foreign funding for political ads and influencers, holding platforms accountable for coordinated inauthentic behavior etc etc, these don't require the government to decide what's true. They require disclosure of who is speaking and who is paying. Think of the US influencers paid unknowingly by Russia, or the "patriotic" X accounts that turned out to be foreign run. Those are just the obvious cases already happening. This needs to stop or at least the public needs clear disclosure of funding and origin.
We have homomorphic encryption now. Let's use it in a way that protects privacy but still helps flag foreign influence and helps distinguish between foreign speech and protected domestic speech.
Ha! What sanctions? We are not sanctioning like we truly mean it.
> So I understand your point but you're essentially arguing that because democracies can abuse power,
No, my point is that because democracies are abusing power, right now, we should be against giving them more tools. The US democracy is in an active state of being dismantled because they have lots of shiny legal tools to do it. These very same beginnings can be seen in Europe too, when the EU tries again and again to pass privacy invading internet tracking laws. We are not in favour of Iran building nukes for "defense", and I would wager you won't defend their efforts in the face of critics when they say "hey, we're pretty sure they will abuse it" because it might not happen, even though abuse is clearly already happening.
> Russia etc have no free speech concerns limiting their operations against us. Doing nothing will allow these adveraries to destroy our democracies from within
If democracy is so weak that it needs to be protected from uncomfortable truths and the opinions of its people (read: opinions you or I may not share), then maybe it's not saveable.
> I think we can at least agree that the choice isn't only between "government ministry of truth" and "do nothing" and we need a middle ground solution.
Dead on. The only true weapon to combat misinformation is transparency. But transparency efforts are not what I'm seeing, and they are certainly not what Ursula von der Leyen means when she talks about the Digital Services Act.
I don't think transparency alone will be enough. We may need to treat foreign speech differently from domestic speech (my last sentence from previous comment), with different protections (prioritizing domestic speech) because you simply cannot control the firehose of propaganda coming from the rest of the world. And don't get me wrong, this isn't about silencing foreign opinions. What I mean is we need to recognize that a citizen expressing a view and a state apparatus manufacturing thousands of fake citizens expressing that view are fundamentally different things, deserving different treatment. We already make this distinction in campaign finance, lobbying, broadcasting etc. So I think extending it to the information space isn't a radical departure, it's basically catching up to the modern world.
I want to circle back to something, because I think there's an irony in your argument that's worth examining. The administration you're worried about abusing power is itself a product of the influence operations. We have documented evidence (not speculation) of Russian operations boosting Trump's candidacy in 2016 and 2024. We have confirmed payments to influencers like Tim Pool and others through Tenet Media, amplification networks on social platforms, coordinated campaigns targeting swing state voters. The Mueller investigation, the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the recent DOJ indictments etc all showing the same thing.
So when you say "look at how Trump is abusing power, this is why we shouldn't give governments these tools", I'd ask: how do you think he got there? The foreign influence you're arguing we should mostly tolerate helped install the government you're now citing as proof we can't trust government.
You're using the consequences of the problem as an argument against addressing the problem.
On your "if democracy can't survive this, maybe it's not saveable" point, I find this fatalistic in a way that doesn't match how you argue about everything else. You clearly do think democracy is worth protecting (that's why you're worried about government overreach, civil liberties etc) So I think yu're not a nihilist. So why adopt an all or nothing frame specifically here? Democracies have always required defensive mechanisms. We have treason laws, foreign agent registration, campaign finance rules etc. So it wasn't about "pure openness vs. authoritarianism", but basically it always been about where to draw lines. Drawing them poorly is a risk. But as I said before refusing to draw them at all isn't principled neutrality, it's just losing by default.
I may have missed something but Akamai seem to be living proof that it's possible to operate that kind of business at scale from the US without vice signalling or publicly sucking up to fascist authoritarians.
Good point.
Akamai doesn't have to, because they don't go attracting the kind of clientele who would host pirated soccer videos.
The good players are the US on this front. I say this as a European. Europe at large is in a dark place in terms of freedom of speech, the press, and other issues like immigration. And the US might eventually have to be the ones to apply force to hold our leaders accountable, ironic as that is given history.
> The good players are the US on this front.
Don't be fooled. People like Elon aren't pro-free speech. They only want their speech. For example on Elon's X you can call people all kinds of things but calling someone "CIS gendered" is a ban-able offense [1]. Linking to other platforms was also forbidden for a while and in the H1B discussion X shadow banned a bunch of people [2] and I could go on for a while.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2023/07/02/elon-mus... [2] https://www.newsweek.com/laura-loomer-elon-musk-x-twitter-h1...
Him being a hypocrite doesn't make him wrong
Do as I say, not as I do.
They can't even say "fuck" on TV in the USA, and god forbit a female nipple
That's just a cultural difference between Europeans and Americans, it has nothing to do with freedom of speech in the US.
> he mentions Vance as a way to call for US administration help at a time when the US is entering an open economic conflict with Europe
This is a great way of bombing its business in the EU. Just sayin' :)
This is not as much of a flex as you appear to think it is.
CF is a US company, the EU has the right to make their own - misguided - laws. And CF has the option to simply stop doing business with Italy, or comply with the law. This stupid grandstanding is just a thinly veiled attempt at blackmail which I'm sure will very much impress the legislators and the judges of the country to which it is addressed. /s
I'm a team lead in an American organization that relies heavily on Cloudflare's Project Galileo[1], and I read that post with growing dread. My first thought was that this guy doesn't sound very much like a CEO. Let me rephrase that: He sounds like the kind of unhinged CEO of orgs I try to stay away from (X, for instance).
Then I read what you're talking about:
> [...] we are considering the following actions: [...] 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; [...]
That's punishing all of Italy's users including those whose job it is to call truth to power (Project Galileo is free for journalists). If my state had a similar spat with Cloudflare would we be in danger of losing the infrastructure we've grown to depend on?
I was complacent and we need to re-think our relationship with them. It's true what they say: there's no such thing as a free lunch.
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/galileo/
He has a point about why they would they offer a country services, when the country fines them more than their entire revenue in the said jurisdiction.
I agree, and I'm really split about a lot of this, because screw this ~blackmail~ extortion AGCOM was trying to pull. The only thing I'd say is that a country is more than a department, and these actions will hurt others who had no influence on AGCOM's decisions far more than it'll hurt AGCOM directly. Maybe it will create pressure against AGCOM and force them to back down.
But as a middle manager of a small nonprofit who makes decisions for my org's web infrastructure I have to make sure our organization's infra doesn't become part of a bargaining chip in a future conflict between a giant company and our government.
The act of threatening unrelated customers just because they are in the same country is extremely stupid.
Businesses might not care whether he tweets at JD Vance or Taylor Swift, but the risk of having your website shut down because the CEO of your firewall vendor has a psychological breakdown on Twitter is unacceptable.
It is Friday evening in Europe and the fact that Cloudflare leadership and Cloudflare legal team couldn't put out a statement to mitigate this situation within the last 5 hours shows that this guys could run the company into the ground within blink of an eye.
Remember, some weeks ago Cloudflare had an outage because of an extremely stupid engineering mishap, today it is an extremely stupid leadership mishap. How many more strikes should they be granted?
They are not threatening customers. They are minimizing liability.
If Italians have no influence over AGCOM, then who does?
Cloudflare has very limited leverage here. Punishing the entire country for the actions of their elected government in hope of protest is about as good as they can do other than hoping Trump does something crazy. Every italian citizen has some say over their governments actions, even if they dont support them.
When you fine a company more than the entire revenue they get from your nation, they will pull out. It is not retributive. What is hard to understand about that?
Folks tend to forget what private enterprise is and think these companies have to provide these services like their government's public service.
> If my state had a similar spat with Cloudflare would we be in danger of losing the infrastructure we've grown to depend on?
Absolutely. And if any of their competitors claims they can guarantee that they won't ever (have to) pull out somewhere for political reasons, they're lying or ignorant. You cannot escape politics. One election or new law can redraw the landscape overnight.
Also I doubt you "depend" on any single SaaS product where you're completely at the mercy of another company. There's probably nothing that you couldn't swap out in a pinch.
Exactly, I can't believe the braindead takes being spouted on this thread. Is HN really filled with people that can't think critically the second they leave their terminal?
Cloudflare's job is not to call truth to power. Cloudflare's job is to make money.
Voglio vederti ricevere una multa di 14 milioni di euro e rimanere diplomatico
> That's punishing all of Italy's users including those whose job it is to call truth to power
Cloudflare is a business. If the fines for operating are several times the money it can get from Italian users, why should it stay in Italy at all?
It's like when Wikipedia went dark for a day. It punished all users, but the point is to show that politicians are forcing it to do so.
It is not unrealistic at all. The Olympics are run by politicians, essentially, since they appoint the committees, make the investments, build the infrastructure.
And the ones pushing for these bans are the sport media tycoons: this fight isn't about Anna's Archive, it is about people watching soccer illegally. Because that is where the real money is.
Yeah correct. I hate this so much in this topic. I hate the disrespect for the law in this topic here but he is right here. The Olympics, soccer and all the other sports (but also other billionaires businesses) have to be put back in their place. How is FIFA able to prevent me from drinking my favourite beer in the city center of my favourite town just because world cup is on town.
Another legitimate complaint is how much police force is deployed each week in and around stadiums. The public pays the costs for security, big soccer gets the profits.
> Not a good look on that guy to list his "pro-bono" services and threaten to pull them while asking JD Vance for his help.
I think it's worth noting the quotes around the pro-bono. As outlined by Matthew Prince (Co-founder & CEO, CloudFlare):
> Bandwidth Chicken & Egg: in order to get the unit economics around bandwidth to offer competitive pricing at acceptable margins you need to have scale, but in order to get scale from paying users you need competitive pricing. Free customers early on helped us solve this chicken & egg problem. Today we continue to see that benefit in regions where our diversity of customers helps convince regional telecoms to peer with us locally, continuing to drive down our unit costs of bandwidth.
* https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/88685
* Via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42712433#unv_42712845
It is not charity but a business decision that benefits them.
> It is not charity but a business decision that benefits them.
Of course it benefits them, it's a private enterprise, not a local government providing trash service.
No one also can force them to provide such a service, try to control their global operations which is outside of Italy's jurisdiction, and if they're not making any more they can pack their stuff and leave.
It seems the panel that fined him is politically appointed so seems reasonable to reach for politics to attempt to fight/resolve it.
The panel is backed by a law. Respect the law. Italy has a judicial system and in cases like this, probably some EU court could be also called. US politicians can reach out to EU/Italian politics to harmonize trade... But wait, do not we kill trade deals. They are so unfair (aka. compromises)
He replies to an Italian user
> We can’t offer free services in a country that fines us millions unreasonably. Fix your government or lose access to our charity.
On one hand, I agree with you, it's problematic to threaten collective punishment. However, I don't think it's unreasonable to "divest" from a country trying to fine you for behavior outside of said country. It's also important to communicate that clearly, and unfortunately bluntly. Did you have a different expectation or suggestion for what they should do?
I think it is a big strategic mistake for him to personally take ownership of this topic and to elevate it on a political level. He openly aligned himself with two people who are extremely unpopular in Europe, while threatening an important EU member state.
I think his hubris makes him overestimate Cloudflare's importance for Europe. Cloudflare is simply not important enough. If it was Microsoft or Apple threatening, then maybe - but those companies are clever enough to leverage lobbying for this.
Now the Cloudflare CEO has set himself up to be at the whims of JD Vance/Trump, while providing a perfect "arrogant US tech company" scapegoat that can be slaugthered by European politics and the media conglomerate that he is threatening.
Europe is too important for USA. I don't think the US administration will like the relationship to go sour at this very point in time just because of this Cloudflare doofus barking around.
Anyways, it is like Facebook CEO and Amazon CEO applauding the Trump inauguration; it is a totally unnecessary political statement which fragments their userbase and introduces a political dimension to any procurement decision involving Cloudflare. It takes people's illusion that Cloudflare is a neutral tech company and replaces it with this guy's twitter ramblings, who is obviously an Elon Musk and JD Vance fanboy.
> it is a totally unnecessary political statement which fragments their userbase and introduces a political dimension to any procurement decision involving Cloudflare.
My take was, If you need help from the current State Department, or the current administration, (and I assume they do) it absolutely is a necessary statement. And then, this is them trying very hard to suck up, as is required, without pissing off everyone.
Perhaps I'm wrong, and this is actually a form of honesty, instead of performative theater. In which case I would probably agree with you. It's unfortunate. But I default to the assumption that people aren't children by choice.
Then why bring up Musk, who is perhaps more reviled than even Vance?
I agree, he seems to be ranting and escalating unnecessarily.
The are fining his company 213% of yearly Italian revenue. He is not the one escalating.
He took a risk in ignoring a law instead of exiting the market. They did not escalate, they applied the law.
What we need is an international legal framework for the Internet. And that includes compromises on all sides. China, EU, Russia, US and others have very different understanding on what is right. But hey, I think US politics is America first and cancel all international treaties. Sounds like more problems like this are incoming.
Sure, next we should implement global communism and live in peace and harmony forever! That is most definitely feasible
> Europe is too important for USA. I don't think the US administration will like the relationship to go sour at this very point in time just because of this Cloudflare doofus barking around.
When you say "for USA", what do you mean by "USA"?
Are you talking about the general US population? US corporations? Or the person who decides foreign policy direction (i.e., Trump)?
Because Trump recently ordered the snatching of a foreign head of state because he didn't like how the guy danced and allegedly didn't take him seriously.
I was trying to say that even though the US administration is actively escalating with Europe, I don't think the point in time has been reached where they want to go full berserk and cut Europe off from services by US tech companies. Cloudflare CEO tries to trigger such an escalation right now, but I'm not sure the US administration wants this kind of escalation right now, because it would also accelerate migration away from Microsoft and other US tech companies, hurting their revenue. For FAANG $7M is peanuts, and they won't leave billions on the table just because Cloudflare CEO has a big ego.
Musk and JD Vance are not "extremely unpopular in the EU", they are primarily unpopular with progressives, regardless of the location.
It sounds like you're just upset the Cloudflare CEO sides with conservatives on this particular issue.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but they are, in fact, extremely unpopular in EU
You believe Musk is unpopular with conservatives in the EU?
Overall he is very unpopular. There are a few far right parties that love him but they are outnumbered.
Well, for example, from what you quoted:
> We can’t offer free services in a country that fines us millions unreasonably.
This is normal and reasonable.
> Fix your government or lose access to our charity.
This is petulant and smug.
My suggestion for what they could have done differently is have a PR team handle the public announcements.
TBF what they did here is probably more effective than my plan, but only because the world is a trash fire.
Politics tends to work that way.
Is there some more context then the original post? All I see is CF CEO saying that Vance agrees with the idea that these laws are bad.
Was with him in the first part, then wtf. Vance and the others dont stand for free speech either, it's only their own speech that matters and they'll proudly ban anything else.
Cloudflare really is all in on "we happily host pirate sites and tada, they're not in your country so we'll do nothing about it at all."
1. Vance built a lot of support in Silicon Valley.
2. Tech donated to Vance (and Trump) under the understanding that they would be a protected class.
3. By tagging Vance publicly and directly, he’s calling a favor.
4. If Vance doesn’t take action, it’s a signal that he’s not worth investing in.
> Vance built a lot of support in Silicon Valley.
That's a polite way of saying Thiel successfully installed a puppet as the heir apparent to the most powerful position in the world.
The USA was always on the path on becoming a corpocracy, not a democracy. Musk/Thiel and their puppet JD Vance has cemented it.
Exactly, his whole tirade felt extraordinarily far fetched, sketchy if not outright racist.
I think maybe I should seek out AI art for awhile. I know this is where everything is going and I'm tired of cringing so hard every time one of these AI gen'd images is used in a serious way. But that image at the bottom of the tweet makes the entire post seem less serious to me.
Yes I thought the same. I thought the post was making a good point, but the image just undermined the seriousness of the post, as it characterized Italian politicians as zombies. It made me think less of the author.
It reminds me of any of elon musk’s crash outs.
Kinda a bad thing to be associated with
Attaching a little cartoon at the bottom makes it extremely childish, no "seem" about it.
A person praising Vance and Musk obviously doesn't value due process, judicial oversight and ultimately decency.
Please don't make everything into us versus them.
Also that paragraph is very critical as far as praise goes.
> don't make everything into us versus them
Why not? There are real people out there who wish us harm, are we supposed to just take it?
Rejecting the system, everyone in it, and everyone that's willing to interact with it, is not a way to get good outcomes. No don't "just take it" but encouraging one of the good opinions of the vice president is fine.
I disagree, some systems are so bad they need to be rejected outright. As a European, I find asking for the help of Vance and Musk as hostile, even if the person asking is in the right.
He is not asking Vance for help as an individual but the position he has for the country the company is headquartered in. What would you expect? They cant go and ask a random country for help on a complicated geopolitical issue. You are supposed (maybe required) to contact officials from your country and relevant agencies and institutions.
I'm not the biggest fan of the US Administration currently either but if a company asks them for help, they're doing what you're supposed to do, and they shouldn't be labeled as bad or sharing the view of the current administration.
What would you have them do instead? Honest question.
At the very least don't complain about it publicly. Using diplomatic channels I think things like this can quietly go away. But if you make it an issue in the public court of opinion people usually support their own democratically elected government compared to the increasingly hostile foreign regime.
Not ping them?
There are legal avenues in any jurisdiction to contest decisions that you believe are unfair. Running to the (vice-)president and your oligarch friends is just weak and makes you look like the bully.
Hm, I'm trying to keep an open mind here so help me:
Why exactly would that be weak? Given the resources and connections it needs, wouldn't it be actually very strong? Also, I'm from EU, and nobody in their right mind sees Italy as the victim. The politics in Italy gave gone insane and they are a huge example of a fuck up as a whole country. Also the EU, is trying to push censorship law and most companies in EU are fight with everyone they've got to not let them pass and organize petitions and what not.
Also are you all people supporting this law and the fine or do people, for some weird reason, have started to hate Cloudflare and letting their emotions cloud their judgement? Lets forget Cloudflare for a moment and imagine just another company... Would you still agree entirely on this laws contents and the procedures and fines issued? Lets please all focus on the important topic here. Companies come and go, but destructive laws keep us suffering for decades on end, maybe forever.
If an actor asked Harvey Weinstein for help, I would think less of them. End of story.
You are right. But there is a point here that international harmonization and compromise is a solution here. Which is not exactly a strength of an America First policy.
Elon/Thiel/Miller are the de-factory leaders of your country, and Trump and Vance are their puppets.
The "free speech" argument worked in his favor this time, so... Let's see if he still uses this card the next time something inconvenient comes up.
I agree. Musk calls for "free speech" while censoring his own AI and manipulating elections. There goes my respect for this CEO.
Maybe the free speech he was thinking of was Grok dressing people in microbikinis. I think that's Elon's favourite free speech too.
And yet this is the only thing people seem to focus on in a discussion about a government agency without any of those attributes.
His argument of “free speech” has zero meaning when “shouting out” JDV and Elon. What a joke of a CEO
His tone and sucking up to his authoritarian government will probably only serve to negatively polarize Europe against Cloudflare, even if he might have a point of the substance itself.
Indeed. There was a much better way to make this point.
I don't get how such idiotic people get into those kinds of positions.
Agreed, he really should learn from how Pavel Durov responded to France after he was treated unfairly by French police.
The post is unhinged. Basically a tantrum. It’s sad really. It reminds me of https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r...
tldr you don’t get angry discussing with institutions because it makes you look like an amateur.
https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492
Thanks. I was looking for that at the top, but had to scroll down all the way here to find it.
Cloudflare CEO threatens to pull out of Italy and to stop offering free "cybersecurity" to its residents
Would this mean Italian websites would be free from Cloudflare "bot protection" or whatever marketing name is used for those annoying "Checking your internet connection..." interstitials
HN does not use a "Just one moment..." Cloudlfare interstitial
It seems to do just fine without it
HN does not require Javascript or use of a particular client to request and read its HTML. I use an HTML reader (offline) with no suupport for auto-loading resources, images, JS, CSS or DNS "prefetch" nonsense
The Cloudflare "protection" against so-called "abuse" forces www users to enable Javascript and use a client that exposes them to increased risks, including risks to their privacy and quiet enjoyment of the web
It cannot tell the difference between (a) a single reguest from a single IP address by a www user who prefers a client that is not distributed by an online advertising company or an online advertising company's business partner and (b) so-called "abuse" such as an excessive number of requests, sometimes from many IP addresses
For the purposes of "protection", it considers (a) and (b) the same
CF's "solution" is to force the www user to choose a particular client that puts the www user at risk and exposes them to surveillance and advertising, and surreptitious data collection
"Solve" a problem by creating a new, additional problem
Perhaps it can tell the difference betweeen (a) and (b). But it treats them the same
One thing it should mean is that anyone using Cloudflare is doing so while risking that its CEO suddenly pulls the rug and closes down the service; not a dependency you want in your stack, and not a great look for a service that's supposed to be usable as a stable high-availability one.
I’m sure they’d give you several month to migrate off (and make noise to your government).
I can honestly see why you’d want to stop giving stuff for free to people taking your money.
The alternative to the "checking your internet connection" page for many websites is either "508 Resource Limit Is Reached", "Please click all the boxes with traffic lights", or no website at all. They're not there to bully you, they're there to protect websites from abuse.
Sure, at least the ones that survive DDoS attacks will be.
They can use an European alternative like bunny.net. It's cheaper anyway.
I agree with the CEO, while also feeling a bit nauseous at the MAGA Musk suck-up at the end - I suppose this is the game you have to play with this current administration.
Yeah, it's weird. I don't like the law in Italy, Cloudflare, or the current US administration, but I'm fairly anti-censorship, so I feel compelled to side with Cloudflare unless more info comes to light.
It really doesn’t matter what administration is in charge, at a certain level you have to curry favor with whatever administration is in power and hold your true motives close to your chest. People seem to think what people say in public is perfect knowledge of their true intentions. No. What they say is what they want someone to hear them say. There is nothing to gain by saying what you really feel, no one can prove it’s what you really feel anyway.
Yup.
Plenty of activists on the other side of the spectrum note of "greenwashing" and "pinkwashing", nice words about the environment or LGBT+ rights without any noticeable action beyond adding a temporary pride badge to social media accounts in pride month or a picture of a wind turbine on their website.
Yeah well nobody glazed Biden or Kamala's dicks that hard.
In at least half those cases I can see why. Maybe choose your metaphors a bit more classy?
Classy? In this economy??
I'm fringe class bro.
Because it got you nothing
Isn't that a good thing?
Yes, because then you don’t have to come out and make these forced public statements
You really don't have to praise fascists.
This is great news! Who would have expected Cloudflare to truly contribute to EU digital sovereignty.
On a more serious note, I'm surprised Cloudflare wants to pull out of Italy. Being a company which terminates TLS connections for Italy must be a gold mine for the NSA.
Cloudflare and other US tech companies base business decisions on revenue (and apparently on emotion), not allegiance to government agencies that have fallen out of fashion.
A bit naive concerning the leaks of 15 years ago. NSA cooperation with big tech is very well known.
The NSA don't pay?
Yes, it is good for Europe that US tech leadership comes out in the open and share their twitter ramblings, so nobody can deny that their interests are not aligned with us.
Claiming to and following through are two different actions, lots can happen between the two.
The appeal to an open internet from Cloudflare to Elon and Peter Thiel's stuffed toy is evidence this is not about freedom of speech but a political game. The AGCOM requests are inane and the so-called "Piracy Shield" sponsored by sports team corporations currently eyeing VPNs needs to go and those responsible for it must pay, but this doesn't make this right, either. And the current USA "cabal" isn't shadowy, rather right up your face, mocking you every day.
Started reading the post on Cloudflare's side, but halfway through I ended up against it.
It's a little bit scary that guy is the CEO, his post sounds crazy and unprofessional.
The fact he's posting on X to begin with is a warning in itself.
> The fact he's posting on X to begin with is a warning in itself.
Why so? The counter at the bottom of the post claims that it has been viewed 7.5 million times. I don't know how this translates into individual people; but still, probably a decent reach?
It's not about reach, but about not seeing a problem in being a member of Elon Musk's website.
People are there for reach. Politicians, celebrities. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer, Kaja Kallas, Ursula von der Leyen... If they don't see a problem, why should the Cloudflare CEO?
So blocking Kiwifarms took.. months of activism and loud complaining. Heraled by Matthew as "this is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare's role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with".
However a fine that amounts to ~0.7% of the annual revenue and they threaten to block an entire country?
Actually, the fine amounts to over 200% of Italy-sourced revenue ($17 million fine vs. $8 million in revenue in 2024). Why would you continue doing business in Italy?
They are a conglomerate and per Matthews words "an internet infrastructure provider". Why does the local revenue matter when they are serving a global market?
EDIT: And fwiw, "Why would you continue doing business in Italy?" is not what is being proposed. They are threatening to block 55 million people from ~20% of the world wide web.
They're threatening to remove servers from Italy. They're explicitly NOT threatening to block Italians from being able to access sites through Cloudflare.
I have my fair share of problems with CF, but I assume here that they're threatening higher latency (i.e. requests from Italian users would have to go to a neighboring country to be routed) rather than blocking.
Also Italy would see (very slightly) lower GDP because data centers would have less demand from CF.
How freaking expensive do you think infrastructure is? It's not that expensive, and certainly not anywhere close to the point where it would make a noticeable impact on GDP.
Every little bit counts. At cloudflares scale it could be the difference between a DC having to close up shop or not.
> EDIT: And fwiw, "Why would you continue doing business in Italy?" is not what is being proposed. They are threatening to block 55 million people from ~20% of the world wide web.
There is no mention of blocking people in Italy from using sites protected by Cloudflare. From the tweet:
> we are considering the following actions: 1) discontinuing the millions of dollars in pro bono cyber security services we are providing the upcoming Milano-Cortina Olympics; 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; 3) removing all servers from Italian cities; and 4) terminating all plans to build an Italian Cloudflare office or make any investments in the country.
If they do not want to comply with introducing censorship, then withdrawing from Italy is the only other option. Italian citizens and residents are unfortunately collateral damage.
Because they only violated the "law" in a local market (Italy) .
And the correct response to that is to write up a threat towards the entire population of a country?
It absolutely is. Why should people receive a free service while their democratically elected officials enact laws that enable them to target global revenue in their fines?
Not the whole population. Only those using cloudflare to protect their websites?
What else could they do? The government represent the country. If their business model is not welcome there then they withdraw. It's very fair to say "if you insist on those rules I choose not to play". They owe Italy nothing.
Btw, I recently "threatened" Switzerland to withdraw my business from there because the cost of doing business there (complying with their VAT regulation) is higher than my revenue from there (maybe 1-2 licenses a year). The whole Switzerland will not be able to buy my software because of that. I didn't think of posting about it on Twitter though.
> What else could they do? The government represent the country. If their business model is not welcome there then they withdraw. It's very fair to say "if you insist on those rules I choose not to play".
They can just not threaten the population of Italy? They are a 2 billion dollar company that has apparently scheduled a meeting with the vice president of the US on short notice? This is going to be resolved politically.
> Btw, I recently "threatened" Switzerland to withdraw my business from there because the cost of doing business there (complying with their VAT regulation) is higher than my revenue from there (maybe 1-2 licenses a year). The whole Switzerland will not be able to buy my software because of that. I didn't think of posting about it on Twitter though.
You have not given "free services" to 20% of the world wide web that you are now using as leverage.
Politic is not separate from the population though. Pressure from the population (hopefully) sways political decisions. This is why google news pulling out of countries were public.
how would you not threat? Are you willing to donate $ for cloudflare to operate there with such fines?
How much revenue did Kiwifarms bring in?
He isn't threatening to block Italy, just to remove cloudflare's business from there. Anyone living and surfing from Italy would not be blocked by cloudflare from accessing any service provided by cloudflare.
Yeah that makes sense to me. If you come up to me and say “you have to arrest that guy; he’s stealing from me” I have to do a lot of research to make sure that everything is correct.
On the other hand, if I see you steal from me, I don’t have to do a lot of research. I am a first party to the thing. I can be sure.
It’s the difference between a policeman arriving on the scene of an assault and someone actually assaulting the policeman.
The acting party being the affected party simplifies things because you know you’re not a “confused deputy”.
How do you not understand the difference..?
> So blocking Kiwifarms took.. months of activism and loud complaining.
Kiwifarms isn't a pirate site. It's just another site that you think is legitimate to censor.
> However a fine that amounts to ~0.7% of the annual revenue and they threaten to block an entire country?
What's going to be next weeks fine? Of course they should block the entire country. Even if they pay the fine (I could imagine there's some way that the EU could force that on pain of forcing them out of Europe), they should block the country.
Shouldn't Italy want lawbreakers to leave?
>activism and loud complaining
I'm not sure why would you want to remind the world about that episode. those men lied, stalked, harassed, and threatened a lot of people to get that perfectly legal website exposed to very illegal DDoS attacks.
Matthew Prince’s framing of Italy’s action as a “free speech assault by a shadowy cabal” is rhetorically exaggerated, but his underlying concerns about due process have legitimate basis—confirmed by EU Commission criticism of the same system.
The reality is more nuanced than either party presents: Italy is enforcing an aggressive copyright protection regime with documented implementation flaws, while Prince is strategically reframing an anti-piracy dispute as a censorship issue and overstating US administration support for his position.
Exactly this.
The americans get here a dose of their own medicine. An IT related law with global reach. One of the first of this kind was actually created by the US itself with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act Now they complain that other countries do the same to them. Somehow I can't feel sorry for them.
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Please don't cross into personal attack or name-calling, and please don't take HN on generic ideological tangents of flamewar tangents.
You may not owe $CEO better but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
All of this should be clear if you've reviewed https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html recently.
I read the tweet twice and I don’t see any mention of free speech. What he’s describing, when you look past the rhetoric, sounds ridiculous: a single medium sized country is demanding power to institute global blocks of content on the internet? If that’s an accurate description, that’s deeply concerning for the long term viability of the internet.
> And in this case @ElonMusk is right: #FreeSpeech is critical and under attack from an out-of-touch cabal of very disturbed European policy makers.
seems perfectly reasonable for a country of any size to exercise this sort of power within their own borders
the US constitution doesn't apply worldwide
if Petulant Prince doesn't like it: he can leave
Emphasis on global blocks. Meaning everywhere in the world.
He is mentioning Vance and Musk as beacons of democracy and free speech.
Did you and I read different tweets?
"While there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration" and "in this case @ElonMusk is right" are not how you talk about beacons.
Read the tweet a 3rd time. Free Speech is mentioned in Paragraph 4 when he's thanking Vance and Musk. It's highlighted in Blue. It's a Hashtag.
Please read the entire tweet. Free speech is mentioned at character number 1779.
I cannot believe this is the first time that Cloudflare has been confronted by a local government which asked to perform "global" filtering of content. It is clear for anyone who has worked with bureaucrats that their "global" means "within our jurisdiction". It is extremely weird that he feels emboldened to publicly lash out like this and pull in people who are extremely unpopular in Europe.
You keep saying this, but 'global' has never meant 'in my jurisdiction' in any conversation or document I've ever read. What additional information can you provide the confirms your interpretation is correct?
> obviously an idiot praising Vance's and Elon's actions
He praised their opinions on free speech. You should be able to differentiate a single opinion objectively from the people holding them.
He actually praised Vance role as a defender of democratic values, but Vance is known to deny Greenlands souvereignity, ready to capitulate to a russian dictator, indifference to police killing a protester recently, etc.
His idea of free speech does not include critical reporting. The wider US government is trying to shut down the BBC with a lawsuit or has public officials threaten individual journalists to their face, basically nothing is too large or too small.
> He actually praised Vance role as a defender of democratic values, but Vance is known to deny Greenlands souvereignity, ready to capitulate to a russian dictator, indifference to police killing a protester recently, etc.
Horrible stuff. I agree. His statement about free speech in the EU, when removed from him as a person, is still true. Progressive media sources agree [1]. If both aisles, as well as European free speech activists, think something is going horribly wrong in Europe, we should listen.
[1]: https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-insult...
Oof, Cloudflare has been one of the most interesting tech companies for me, and one I would have worked for in a heartbeat. But the MAGA pandering in this tweet is quite disappointing. I get it, running a large business in the US these days requires a certain amount of bootlicking, but still. And I say this while generally agreeing with Matthew's stance.
The "haters" who long ago have warned about the risk of Cloudflare MITM'ing global website traffic have been proven right. In the end, Cloudflare is another mass surveillance tool next to Meta/Google/Apple which will be weaponized in the interests of the current US administration.
I hope people go take a look at previous statements by MP/JGC (to be fair, no longer affiliated) with this in mind - I have always found them to be just as degrading and whiny as this announcement reads.
In Spain the LaLiga CEO, Tebas (Soccer association, they are legally fighting against Cloudflare and doing MITM's everwhere) isn't very different in that case (Francoist far right supporter).
Every time any of these CEOs see even the mildest of pushback, the mask just fully falls off and you see them immediately run to the worst people on the planet.
I feel for his chief legal counsel who must be crying in their office right now. In the US, courts have been deactivated for MAGA-aligned rich people, but Cloudflare CEO is so stupid to assume that the same has happened in Italy. The arrogance and ignorance is astounding.
Nobody gets to these positions unless they're a complete sociopath who've long lost touch with reality. Just listen to anything thiel, musk, altman, vance and other degenerates have to say, some animals display more humanity than these golems
This follows 23—again, 23—violations reported to Cloudflare. There is nothing more to add. Given how slowly Italian law typically moves, Cloudflare had more than enough time to take corrective action. The tone would likely have been far more accommodating had Cloudflare attempted to contact the authorities and negotiate its position. Instead, it appears that, in all likelihood, nothing was done after 23 violations. What exactly was the CEO expecting?
23 violations of an unjust and unworkable law. The law is bad and should go.
Fair enough but thats not up to cloudflare to decide, if they operate in the country they must respect its laws
We don't know what the law is. The rules were created with an administrative procedure backed by a very generic statute which is likely unconstitutional. Neither the Supreme court (Cassazione) nor the Constitutional court have ruled on the matter yet.
Getting a fine is the first step towards further judicial review, probably.
so CF is clear - if the law is not changed they'll leave italian market. That's fair
And he is more than welcome to do so. The services provided by Cloudflare can easily be replaced by more local providers that have no problem complying with Italian laws. The takedown might not happen within 30 minutes, but there would still be action and a response to a report from the authorities. Italy and Europe do not need the arrogance of those who believe they are above the law by virtue of a freedom that is used only as an ideological shield. As if Trump were really the champion of freedom, right?
Is this, like in Spain and some other countries, all basically focused on blocking illegal sports streaming? Especially soccer. I have a friend who runs a fairly large forum (aka a lot of user content including links to illegal things) in Spain who gets letters about 'Illegal streaming links to movies, TV shows and sports' with a list of links; he knows he only has to remove the sports, they do not give a crap about illegal US show streams locally and US requests go to /dev/null as they cannot enforce anyway. So I assume this is only about streaming sports as well?
It's all a racket to extract money from Italians, not enforcing IP rights.
Just like it's mentioned in Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu, some organizations are designed to extract resources from masses. Italian loves soccer and some big shots managed to get the TV rights for a per-pay service, and that's why they're pushing for so hard. Otherwise I don't think Italian courts would go after people selling pirated DVDs on the streets of Milan.
note that this is all about football streaming, which is so funny
as far as i can tell, it's really not about politics or surveillance... it's really just about football streaming, and they push the 30 minute thing because it's important for them to stop it during the match.
it's stupid; but it's even more stupid to do draconian censorship for... football streaming.
Rhetoric is somewhat off, but I have to use 1.1.1.1 to access Anna's Archive from Germany, so he has a point.
Want to mention that not all German ISPs participate in IP-infringing content blocking. I use one that does not.
Setup AdGuard and never look back
How about Quad9?
I'll have to check. I assume they are not immune to decisions of European courts either?
Does Germany require that all DNS providers block Anna's Archive? I thought that was mostly handed for ISP DNS providers.
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"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Not every comment about Germany requires a mention of a dark past.
Doesn't require it, but in this case it sure is relevant
It does not, since the context is absolutely not the same. Closing a major piracy actor VS actions that led to a world war.
Banning books is the same as banning books. Whether it's in the name of censorship or anti-piracy
Not sure you can call it censorship if it's the author of the book who doesn't want you to access it for free. I know there are a few levels of indirection here, but with a few notable exceptions authors are normally against their books being pirated.
I personally sure want Anna's Archive staying up, but comparing it to nazis burning books is a bit too much IMO
Because the US doesn't act against copyright infringement? They just suspended the Annas Archive .org domain
At least we don't ban books from Libraries, because they contain the true history or "wrong thought" and Republicans don't like that
This isn't banning books, it's akin to banning a book store. If a book store chain isn't paying their taxes and gets shut down, the books have not been banned or censored.
Don't even need to rely to anti-piracy to find book banners. US public schools continue to accelerate their book banning tendencies.
* https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/ * https://www.ala.org/news/2025/04/american-library-associatio... * https://cdhe.colorado.gov/banned-book-list
Book bans at department of defense high schools are resulting directly from this administration's executive orders.
* https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/dodea-book-bans
We need to keep fighting for the right to read freely.
Meanwhile, waiting for Cloudflare to walk away from their US government contracts to protest these blatant free speech attacks.
I mean when Germany is jailing people for being "offensive" it's hard not too.
You are confidently incorrect, very impressive.
Don't worry, this time it's the Social Democrats who ban books, it's _totally_ different.
Most western countries who care about IP have banned piracy. I'm not anti piracy but it's silly to compare.
Back in the day it was US media companies which started the big war against piracy and for the use of DRM. It was pushed by US media companies and the US government upon Europe. Same as with software patents. It's weird that now US companies complain about local media rights holders doing their censorship thing when the whole thing was started by the US.
I'm not sure, does US not block websites by DNS? Wrt Anna's Archive they've gone as far as revoking its main domain
US owns the registrars, they just deregister domains they don't like and show some sort of FBI logo instead.
I demand the RIGHT to get media for free without paying for it! And I equate this with a ban on literature!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...
> Participants: Republican lawmakers in red states
oh weird, it's the opposite of what you said.
Politics isn't the exclusive hobby of the united states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/politics/the-spd-parties...
And by the way, in the same wikipedia link you posted, there's documentation of Democrats also banning books.
What book banning are you referencing, then? it's all very vague
I can buy all the books listed there in the USA.
That's privilege. They're not available at the library at the learning centers.
*learing centers
Cloudflare is a haven for abuse.
Most large scam groups now have their own ASNs and IP registrations, so CF just forwards them the report and tells you to contact fiberscam.co.za or whatever fake company the scam group has created. They are not cut out for this workaround and yet the largest scam groups have been using it since 2023.
I don't think they are currently doing any statistical analysis, one provider has just 3 /24s and hosts thousands of scam shops, hundreds of reports to CF and nothing done, they won't consider blocking the ASNs even when you show them a report that 98% of the IPs they own serve scam shops.
At this point I consider CF willfully negligent.
I am just translating this from https://www.agcom.it/sites/default/files/provvedimenti/delib....
"In its memoirs, Cloudflare also states that its services: “do not give rise to the transmission of content on the websites of service users; [...] do not allow Cloudflare to know, control, or modify in any way the content of the websites, which always remains available on a third-party web server regardless of its services.”"
:)))
> In addition, we are considering the following actions: > ... > discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users
What has Cloudflare done to fight piracy enabled by their services and help solve the root cause of the issue? Anybody know?
This seems like an issue that could have been solved when it was smaller.
Lawyers and politicians are not who you want to find solutions to this kind of issues.
Did Cloudflare provide solutions that were refused by the other party?
Wow! That's an appalling image to finish with. How could you possibly think that was good?
does he not understand that countries are...countries? "quasi-judicial" is so childish of a thing to say, of all people by a CEO.
I don't even care about the details of the law, what is he aiming to achieve here by disrespecting their government as a foreigner and accusing them of "censorship". Makes wish they'd fine him just for that tweet alone. You do what a country tells you to do as a foreigner, or you leave.
These people want immigrants in their own country who obey their own laws to be treated like animals and deported to countries they've never even heard of before, yet they don't think they're obliged to follow the laws of other countries.
Isn't this guy an HN user too @eastdakota (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eastdakota), or am I mistaken? I'd love to hear his response to this thread, just as a fly-on-the-wall.
> You do what a country tells you to do as a foreigner, or you leave.
I suppose you're right. You're still allowed to criticize the government's decisions though! This is certainly true in Italy, which has quite reasonable laws with regards to freedom of speech.
> what is he aiming to achieve here by disrespecting their government
Western government instituitions are hardly sacred. Again, people are allowed to criticize them, or disrespect them event if they so desire. What he's trying to achieve is a more just and reasonable application of the law, as it's quite clear if you'll care to carefully read the tweet instead of raging at his supposed disrespect for the Italian government.
The people in italy are allowed to do whatever they want with their own government. Even foreigners in other countries, who cares. But if you're a guest, you don't disrespect your host, certainly not about the rules they have.
Imagine if I were to complain about HN rules and how the moderators are tyrants. That's what @eastdakota is doing. It's one thing to say that when you're posting else where, but not here. he's not having to following italian laws because he's an italian, he's having to do so, so that he can be afforded the privileges of doing business there.
part of democracy is being free to criticize. And their threat to leave italian market is fair too
I mean it's quasi-judicial because it's not a court what else would you call it?
By its name. he used that to question the legitimacy of the organization. I don't know why you would defend him or they would tolerate this.
I should probably make sure my usage of Cloudflare is ready to be migrated off at a moments notice if it's this easy for Cloudflare to consider getting rid of it for a whole country. Funny enough, after a month in Italy and using my tailscale node at home out of habit, most online services assumed my home IP wanted the Italian version of every website (including Cloudflare). I wonder if that would have also included blocking me from access (if this ends up going through).
I'm dead against Privacy Shield, but if it gets Cloudflare out of Europe then maybe it was worth it?
BTW, before I read this Xweet I was a Cloudflare fan.
> BTW, before I read this Xweet I was a Cloudflare fan.
The CEO of a US tech company asking the Vice President for help with censorship caused you to immediately flip you opinion? And not only flip your opinion, but practically embrace complete censorship of the internet if that means Cloudflare leaving Europe?
..yikes.
Why is he asking for Elon for help too?
some good takes in this response but complementing jd and elon was absolutely not necessary
One must be thankful to him for removing the illusion that Cloudflare is some benevolent, neutral US company fighting for a more secure internet.
My risk acceptance is not big enough to have all Cloudflare-secured websites in my country to go offline just because someone from my country has a Twitter fight with a member of the US administration or with the Cloudflare leadership.
> One must be thankful to him for removing the illusion that Cloudflare is some benevolent, neutral US company fighting for a more secure internet.
yeah it's great isn't it
now all anyone has to do to discredit cloudflare is point to their CEO's pro-elon posts
the AI slop picture at the bottom really sells it too
He's just sucking up to them to get them to act on his behalf.
It was necessary to get them to take action. The only thing the current administration cares about is public image so publicly fellating them is what you need to do to get them to go to bat on your behalf.
He runs a private company, not a government institution and I'm sure they can pay a lawyer to sue the Italian entity if it displeases him so much. Like everybody else would.
When did Hacker News start talking like Reddit?
I want just to step in by telling that Cloudflare also has networks in China. Probably not the best company to talk about freedom of speech when they collaborate with these goverments actively...
https://www.cloudflare.com/application-services/products/chi...
If american corps do not want to play according to European rules: go ahead, just stop doing business in Europe. Europe will be fine! Understand that there are other things than the US‘s commercial interests even though it seems ATM that’s everything the US is: commercial interests. On the east, on the west: Wake up!
> Europe will be fine!
Unfortunately, no. Europe is not fine and won't be fine anytime soon. CloudFlare's situation is one of the cases.
Doing business is different in the EU as it is different in China or Russia. If you want it to be not different, work in globalization not America first.
Europe was fine until it got disrupted by Russia and the US. But that has nothing to do with this topic here. This is just a company not following a local law. Nothing special in the law (it is shitty like any IP law) or the case here.
I don't fear getting shot by police. Or fear for my kid's while he's in school. Or medical debt
We can live without cloudflare
How is it a bad thing to have cloudflare out of your country? No single entity should have the power to do this kind of thing even if they choose not to. Don't threaten italy with a good time
Related: EU commission has also criticized AGCOM for Privacy Shield [0].
> The Commission would also like to emphasize that the effective tackling of illegal content must also take into due account the fundamental right to freedom of expression and information under the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU
[0]: https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-shield-concerns-prompt-eu-co...
I'm not sure I have ever seen such an unprofessional communication from the CEO of Cloudflare, irrespective of a poorly written Italian law.
The fine was also peanuts for a company the size of Cloudflare.
Given the current political climate I think the tone he is using will turn a lot of Europeans off: Open threats against citizens of an EU country (turning off free cyber protections) and general 'American Exceptionalism' attitude and brown nosing of the current administration.
He is within his rights to pull out of a market, but this is an example of the now-becoming-classic Trumpism of smugly shouting pretty extreme open threats to bully your way into getting what you want (and screw everyone else who isn't America).
It honestly makes me want to add it to the list of American tech companies willing to sabotage Europe for disproportionate reasons. (Currently X, Microsoft) and start planning strategies to decouple from them, if not outright replace.
Perhaps this is a knee-jerk reaction, but I was not expecting this from Cloudflare.
the fine being 2x revenue from italy is not peanuts. The threat to leave the country is more than fair. If we are talking about sabotaging europe we should focus in the first place on chat control laws and how those slowly slip into adoption...
> Perhaps this is a knee-jerk reaction, but I was not expecting this from Cloudflare.
You’re surprised that an American CEO is speaking out against a large fine many believe is bogus, instead of not saying anything to avoid offending…Europe? I don’t think anyone in the world right now is intimidated by the EU, from China to the US to Russia.
I'm Italian, and as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist, I find hard to empathize with Cloudflare, especially after this tweet.
First off, the immediate appeal to Vance and Musk is embarrassing. I believe he knows he's technically in the wrong for not abiding to the law, so gathering the sympathy of the "freedom fighters" of the web is all he can do. But the funniest part about this tweet are the "threats" he makes towards Italy.
> In addition, we are considering the following actions: > ... > discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users
He phrases it to be as if the free tier is a favor Cloudflare does to the world, as if it's not obviously a loss-leader designed to get more people into the Cloudflare ecosystem.
> Removing all servers from Italian cities
This is my favorite by far. Does he think that this will start a popular uprising? My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.
In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand. I hope this ends up as being a push for independent European cloud.
> He phrases it to be as if the free tier is a favor Cloudflare does to the world, as if it's not obviously a loss-leader designed to get more people into the Cloudflare ecosystem.
It can be both. I run many open source websites behind cloudflare.
It's the same as github. All the free hosting and free CIs and free issues/discussion forums, and free code review for open source repos (90% of all open source projects?) happens to be a a loss leader as well.
Both are still a huge free contribution to the world. They don't have to do it. They could just have zero free anything.
What market share would they have without offering the free tier? Much lower than what they have now, and that would make for a more decentralised and resilient internet
Do you remember how bad things were before CloudFlare? You’d get attacked constantly if you ran a large website.
I remember Tor being significantly more usable, and not having random 3 second delays on websites.
> and that would make for a more decentralised and resilient internet
The only people that say that haven't run a site on the open internet in the last decade plus. It's such an ignorant takes it's hard to take anything you say seriously.
I’m not advocating for having no protections at all. Without Cloudflare giving away protection for free it’s entirely possible that we would have multiple smaller provider offering protection at a fair price so maybe only a smaller fraction of the internet goes offline next time Cloudflare pushes a bad configuration
fair price and europe sounds interesting... regardless it still means your competition will have it easier
Im sorry but your epistemics are very wrong. Providing a free service with no strings attached to nearly every website in the world adds a ton of value, possibly more than Cloudflare’s market cap. And the fact that a free product can lead to profits, when other companies make the choice to pay more, does not remove that worldly contribution.
The first one is always free...
I prefer to not have it at all. One thing is offering free service because you truly know the values. The other is making threats to people.
Another italian here; while this whole situation is bad and piracy shield is definitely not the solution, having the cloudflare CEO that threatens to remove free-tier service makes me wonder. They offer a free pill, just to be the "powerful" guys that threaten people when they are paying some million euros.
Well done my friend. :-) I'm already moving websites off cloudflare. bye!
P.S: I believe piracy shield is a s*t idea naturally.
Cloudflare is clearly in the right. Global censorship from an unaccountable cabal is a moral wrong. There's no sense in which Italy somehow 'wins' here, because even if they win, they lose.
Presumably AGCOM are accountable to the Italian government and therefore ultimately the Italian people. Or do you just mean 'unaccountable' in the sense that Americans should be able to do whatever they please, wherever they please, and they don't appreciate being hindered by trivial things like other country's laws.
Clearly? Or clearly according to the statement in a Xweet from their CFO?
I am very pro-piracy, but calling to Trumpist elite reads like he thinks that European instututions have no right to censor Internet, because they are European, while controlling the Internet is an exlusive American right.
I really think Europe should adopt a Chinese approach to copyright, but I don't expect US to like it at all - they started it all after all with DMCA etc.
AGCOM and cloudflare ceo can all be wrong and horrible at the same time. You don't have to pick a side
Agreed!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46557533
Well considering the fine is larger than their profits in Italy, why on earth would they keep doing business there?
Yeah lemme just keep burning money to provide a service in a single country.
Is there some idea that CF is a public utility?
Or an idea that CF should just comply with a 30 minutes zero questions asked API infamous for egregious false positives?
That CEO should stop posting but that just sounds like a business decision
> My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.
While that is true, the datacenters hosting those servers are going to lose a massive amount of monthly income by not having those servers colocated anymore.
And just out of curiosity, how many small/medium websites would have the in house know-how to switch to a different CDN? Cloudflare fronts your site, giving you an 'automatic' CDN, where most others require changes to your site to work with.
What happens when BunnyCDN finds itself in the same situation?
I suspect they'll follow the law and do what the court says
rather than pleading to their feudal masters on twitter and threatening to throw their toys out of the pram
> I suspect they'll follow the law and do what the court says
Which, to me, seems like a clearly worse outcome? I hate the feudal masters more than most on HN, if that somehow matters for the credibility of my own opinion.
would they follow the chat control laws too to spy on all citizens?
The free offerings are not a loss-leader in the conventional sense of anticipating future upsell. They are a traffic generator used to drive up Cloudflare’s leverage when negotiating peering with carriers & service providers, in order to drive down the marginal cost of bandwidth for Cloudflare’s actual product, the enterprise DDoS protection, with the criticality of traffic interchange expenses being evident in the vehemence with which Cloudflare discuss peering matters, such as via the astroturf’d “bandwidth alliance” grouping they sponsor.
In which vein, anyone familiar with The Peering Playbook will recognise the kind of annoying hardball Prince thinks he is playing, but I doubt it works on nation states.
> In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand.
This isn't international law though. It's an authoritarian move by the Italian government. "Technically" and "legally", you're correct that Cloudflare is wrong for not building infrastructure to help Italy censor the web from Italians, but sometimes you should break the law if you disagree with it strongly enough.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but I find it interesting that no where in your comment did you try to justify the behaviour other than to say "it's the law". But that is the problem. Why is it the law? Do you think the law is justified?
> My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.
Completely agree with you there. Seems like a pretty stupid move to be honest. If I were CEO of Cloudflare I'd probably just shut my mouth and censor the internet.
The law is shitty. But we have football team owners mixing with politics, and this is the end result.
Berlusconi owned football teams, Lotito owns Lazio and is actually in the party Forza Italia, one of the parties in the ruling coalition
"he's technically in the wrong for not abiding to the law"
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
My conspiracy theory is that the EU is actively trying to create their own cloud through regulation after seeing the economic success from china's internet companies after the great firewall.
> EU is actively trying to create their own cloud
Unfortunately, the EU is not nearly coordinated for such a thing. And even if they were, regulation is not what will make it happen. EU is in a crisis of financial (VISA, AmEx) and software services (AWS, MS, Google) being almost entirely provided by USA. They are not going to dig themselves out of the hole by regulation.
For contrast, USA is (largely) dependent on China, Korea, and Taiwan for chips. But they decided to attack the problem by investing several hundred billion dollars to develop their domestic microchip manufacturing infrastructure [1]. This appears to be paying dividends already as TSMC is already producing chips in Arizona, and estimated 30% of all production of 2nm and better to be produced in USA by 2030.
It seems to me that this is the way nations take control of their problems. Unfortunately EU seems incapable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act
> It seems to me that this is the way nations take control of their problems. Unfortunately EU seems incapable.
Incapable of being a nation I guess
It's not.
I think GP meant that in the sense that the EU is not a nation, it's a union of nations.
> estimated 30% of all production of 2nm and better to be produced in USA by 2030
There will come a time when the EU is also buying their chips from USA and then they'll wonder how that happened.
There will be a time when the whole world buys its Fabs from the EU. Good luck getting more after US steals Greenland...
This is called "digital sovereignty", and it has been a major topic for OpenInfra foundation and other open source cloud foundations. Open source, and open cloud software, is the way to ensure your data can stay inside your own borders and be governed by your local laws. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvz2PcHq0yY is one example of folks talking about this, but realistically you can find talks from OpenStack/OpenInfra going back 4/5 years on this topic.
I love this. digital sovereignty sounds so cool too
We have plenty of cloud providers, most are on national levels, not international levels.
That's definitely happening. The US does this through massive government spending on American solutions. The EU is only starting to go that route as well.
>In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand
International law??
Italian law you mean.
Why should 1.1.1.1 block a site because some Italian wanted it blocked? Sod off.
Also I am Swedish, so EU here too. Sick of this whiny victim attitude.
> International law??
Note the "general line". You know, bombing boats in international waters, abducting awful dictators and "running" the country sidelining the opposition, threatening to take over an autonomous territory of Denmark, meddling with German and British politics and generally behaving very much like fascists and a wannabe dictator.
First off, the immediate appeal to Vance and Musk is embarrassing.
It's a very unhinged, very Trumpy response. The repeated use of "cabal" and hyperbole is, as you say, embarrassing.
It's useful to know this is the official voice, tone, and attitude of CloudFlare. Now I know not to recommend it to my company. The owners would not be happy to do business with an organization that has its politics and alignment so close to the surface.
Really?
A group of people who were elected by nobody, should, without any accountability or due process, be able to ban any website they don't like from the internet? And not just for Italians but globally?
Even if you think this is a great thing for Italians (I have no idea why anyone would think that), you expect the whole world to surrender to this absurd demand? Categorical imperative???
Piracy Shield only works within Italy. No provider has ever been expected to take down sites globally in response to a Piracy Shield trigger, or has ever done so.
Also read the start of the comment. See this?
> as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist
> i’m italian
unfortunately this preamble doesn’t add the weight you assume it should. what has being italian got to do with having an opinion on this? this and all the other “italian here” takes below. fwiw unless eastdakota is being intentionally malicious, he, with the cloudflare legal team, understands the situation and its implications for cloudflare better than any random italian.
Cloudflare is talking about Italian law and Italian policy and making comments about his actions they will take in Italy with Italian users specifically.
“Italian here” as in “I am not a random person with no skin in the game / I live in the country and presumably am more well informed on the policy he is talking about.
If there was a post about a law in nyc, I think it would be helpful to hear takes from New Yorkers.
> I believe he knows he's technically in the wrong for not abiding to the law,
Free speech loses when people answer to critics of a speech limiting law that they should just follow it.
I also didn't enjoy the bit where, after saying the EU was against what Italy is doing, then blames the whole continent of Europe for this policy...and then inflicting it on the UK, which despite brexit, is still in Europe
Cringey and childish appeals to US government and billionaires aside, it’s funny how this is framed as “Magnanimous Free Speech Technology Company” vs “Evil European Bureaucratic Shadow Cabal” when the latter is more like “Massive Sports Monopoly Regulatory Capture”.
When corporate entities do something bad, like attempting to maximize profits by capturing regulatory entities and bending them to their will, it’s the government’s fault. It’s laundering agency: the corporation has no agency because it simply seeks to maximize profits, but the bureaucrats have agency and are therefore morally wrong (Cloudflare CEO appealing to morals in his tweet).
Very few comments in this thread decrying the root of the issue, which is that the football media empire has grown large enough that they’re imposing negative outcomes on the pubic hand that feeds them.
Oh, wow. I had no idea the CEO of cloudflare was so unprofessional.
Cloudflare is not for the open internet; they can you kick you out of their service if they don't like you whenever they want, which is fine and legal for that matter or they freaking can have an outage and have your service shut down that way. It's a lose, lose situation. Stay out of Cloudflare, there is nothing good about them.
they can kick you out*
That's an epic polemic. If the cost of operating in Italy isn't profitable, exit Italy. If it is, then adhere to the laws of Italy. If Italy makes the cost of business too high they'll dial it back.
Given the La Liga situation in Spain with Cloudflare you can't really say he is wrong. But his MAGA comments make me ashamed to be a Cloudflare customer.
Which MAGA comment, specifically? Are you referring to this?
> While there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration, I appreciate @JDVance taking a leadership role in recognizing this type of regulation is a fundamental unfair trade issue [...]
You may or may not agree, it hardly seems MAGA though.
> But his MAGA comments make me ashamed to be a Cloudflare customer.
You have the power.
I'm actively looking for alternatives to migrate current projects.
For sure I won't use it for new projects.
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cdn-content-delive...
The CDN is the least crucial aspect of Cloudflare for me. There's really no one else that has Pages, Workers, KV, R2, WAF, etc at the same price. You need to stitch services from multiple providers.
Bunny is the closest option I've found but still lacking in some areas and the pricing is quite different.
> But his MAGA comments make me ashamed to be a Cloudflare customer.
Asking the federal government for help dealing with other nation clearly a massive part of the federal government's role = MAGA now?
> It's impossible for either a government or parliamentary body to tell to an indipendent authority what to do and what not to do
What did Borghi mean by this? Isn't that the equivalent of a US senator publicly stating that the FCC is outside of the US federal government's ability to reign in?
American services leaving the European market would be a blessing for european IT, but alas the europeans are not kicking then out, instead milking for fines.
I WISH cloudflare did all the things they threaten to do, but they won't
Italian authorities woke up pissed and decided to block some sites.
Matthew Prince can decide to censor the sites he doesn't like, but god forbid some actual legal authority does the same thing.
AI generated image he attached to his post is cringe.
CF: 'Cloudflare is not the hosting provider of the reported content. Cloudflare offers network service solutions including pass-through security services, a content distribution network (CDN) and registrar services. Due to the pass-through nature of our services, our IP addresses appear in WHOIS and DNS records for websites using Cloudflare.'
I have a feeling that usually when someone complains about freedom of speech, they are actually complaining about something else.
They should fight it. But why does he have to suck up to JD Vance and Musk I the same post? I kind of lost empathy at that point.
It's a shame that Italy is going down this path. As an Italian, I'm very disappointed and worried that these kind of fines are issued.
The worst part: because this has been issued by Agcom, it is also likely that this is not caused by the current government. Agcom is a bunch of bureaucrats that do not report to anyone other than themselves.
Eastdakota is right in saying that the rule of law is being disregarded. As a lawyer, and as someone that has been studying Italian institutions for decades, the problem is real and is only getting worse.
It’s easier for a state to enforce censorship when there is only a SPoF
If you are curious on how it looks a website taken down by Italian state apparatus, have a look at
https://phica.eu
(in details: the action was carried out by the Central Directorate for Scientific Police and Cybersecurity within the Department of Public Security, Ministry of the Interior).
The domain resolves (by many DNS, 1.1.1.1 included) to Cloudflare IPs :)
If the CEO of the company of a foreign nation threatens a country, they country needs to inspect.
Definitely an everyone sucks here situation.
The Italian 'piracy shield' is indeed reprehensible, but the tweet is very far out there as well. For all I care Cloudflare blocks the entirety of Europe for a week or so in protest, but aligning yourself with the bunch of fascists now in charge of the US government and prefacing that with "while there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration" is pretty insane as Cloudflare will be at the complete mercy of their lawlessness, if not now, then in the future.
Reminds me of what France did to Telegram, but Pavel Durov has obviously made a much better statement
I totally disagree with Italy's law, but quoting Vance and Musk on this plus the AI slop at the end. Nah, I'm taking my stuff out of Cloudflare.
This seems easy enough to solve. Every time the football oligarchy catches too many IPs in their dragnet, you can accidentally drag all the legitimate football exit nodes into your DNS blacklist. The only way to be sure DNS doesn't work for pirated football is to ensure it doesn't work for any football.
I don’t understand why they are tying the fine amount to global revenue rather than Italian revenue. Any Italian here who can explain it ?
It's pretty common in fact for certain countries, see for example https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russia-fines-google-20-de...
Where does it mention Global Revenue ? It's just a symbolical fine
Practically it's the same - some arbitrary amount.
Easy. Tech companies love revenue and profit shifting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich
The sales are 'made' in the US despite the customer and the "sales team" in the country.
Ehm This is already completely outdated. Every EU country has now strict transfer pricing laws
Ah Digital service act fines and other eu fines are tied to Global revenue.
List the sites they want offline'd, @eastdakota?
I think the pirates are using fast flux so the list of sites changes daily or hourly.
okay, Cloudflare CEO is gonna complain his business and legal issues with the one who is defending a murder . Great!.
Is this similar to what happened in Spain?
"EU shadow cabal" funny considering that he then mentions running for help to US politicians.
it's even funnier considering EU's shadowy chat control adoption
You can accuse the US politicians of a lot but hiding in the shadows is probably the last thing you can say about the current USA administration.
you mean because they get found out, not because they don't try?
Isn't this the same government that started a secret war against Venezuela without any authorization?
Secret? You can say a lot about the USA in Venezuela but secret isn't it and of course it was authorized congress explicitly granted the president the powers to do it.
Hardly "authorized" when the required consultation was sidestepped:
Trump’s attack on Venezuela without alerting Congress tests limits of executive power - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/04/trump-congre...
Now that they're aware, they're belatedly and ineffectively attempting to reign him in:
Senate votes to limit Trump on Venezuela - https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/08/senate-votes-to-res...
No. Furthermore, that is not a shadow cabal.
Why do people go out of their way to criticize Trump like this?
Attacking other countries without declaring war is a staple of pretty much every US president since WW2, republican or democrat. Carter is the only one who stands out (ironically, despite the fact that he had a good cause to invade Iran).
Sorry, which presidents did Obama and Biden kidnap again?
I mean they bombed Libya enough to get Muammar Gaddafi killed is that close enough?
Vance is hardly operating in the shadows. He is a very public figure.
I presume that law was passed by public vote of Italian elected politicians? Not a shadow either
Yep. It sounds like “shadowy cabal” is just an emotive term for “deputised decision-makers doing something that is inconvenient for my organisation”. There’s nothing shadowy about it. It’s just not American.
we only see 20% of what happens in the shadow, but yah, I guess its better than 100%
If there were an EU shadow cabal who exactly would you run to help for?
When Bonasera’s daughter is assaulted and the perpetrators released, he goes to Don Corleone. That makes sense. It’s not funny or ironic that he turns to criminals to help with criminals.
You need power to counter power.
What an absurd twisting of reality this is. There is no EU shadow cabal, as opposed to the very real not-so-shadowy cabal currently running the USA. Where the EU is concerned with a rule-based order, justice, and fair conditions, the US administration engages in open corruption, cronyism, and outright rule by force.
The CEO of an American company complaining about the unfair treatment in Europe is more than ridiculous.
Probably because the admin has been vocal and proactive about extraterritorial overreach by European countries hellbent on global censorship programs.
The UK has thrown thousands of people in jail for speech on social media, as has Germany. Both of those countries also attempt to censor speech OUTSIDE of their own countries too.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
>The UK has thrown thousands of people in jail for speech on social media, as has Germany.
Source?
Certainly. The UK routinely and repeatedly jails people for protected speech, including speech protected by international standards. [1] [2] [3]
[1] https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/...
[2] "Internet freedom declined in the United Kingdom during the coverage period due to a reported increase in criminal charges for online speech"
[3] "A separate report from The Telegraph found that 292 people had been charged for spreading false information and “threatening communications” under the Online Safety Act between when it came into effect in 2023 and February 2025. Some civil liberties groups expressed concern that the laws were being applied broadly and in some cases punished speech protected by international human rights standards (C3)."
> proactive extraterritorial overreach
They are certainly very active in the subject, although judging by the last week, they are not really against it in every case
>The UK has thrown thousands of people in jail for speech on social media
That is just not true, is it. No matter how many times you say it
https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/...
"Internet freedom declined in the United Kingdom during the coverage period due to a reported increase in criminal charges for online speech"
"A separate report from The Telegraph found that 292 people had been charged for spreading false information and “threatening communications” under the Online Safety Act between when it came into effect in 2023 and February 2025. Some civil liberties groups expressed concern that the laws were being applied broadly and in some cases punished speech protected by international human rights standards (C3)."
292 is not thousands though, is it? Making the statement a barefaced lie.
That is before we go into the actual cases of what those people did. I'm concerned about it too, and am able to freely engage with my political representatives over it. They listen and discuss it, because we are a functioning democracy. But hyping it up and lieing about it doesn't help the discussion. Please don't do what everyone else does next and post about one specific case that on a cursory examination seems troubling, I won't be drawn into it.
There are no "European Global Censorship Programs".
Maybe try to get your information elsewhere than Fox News (based on the Nonsense in all your recent comments)
> There are no "European Global Censorship Programs".
Except Chat Control of course.
Where does the EU want to reach beyond their borders here?
This is flat-out factually inaccurate. Don’t bring this tripe here, please and thank you.
> The UK has thrown thousands of people in jail for speech on social media
Not true… and those that were jailed were convicted for inciting racial hatred and most of them admitted the offence
Sounds similar to the UK Online Safety Act and their internet Czar.
I kind of like(d) Cloudflare, but appealing to Musk and the couch lover that's currently serving as VP is despicable. What a swamp the US have become.
Surly this post must have the opposite effect of what he intended. Even if you side with Cloudflare on the core issue this post is so cringy my butthole collapsed into itself.
Are Americans not embarrassed by the way these tech bros operate? As a European it’s obvious that the US gone from an allied to an enemy. I would feel like a traitor if I picked US tech these days.
As a non-American (and non-European) I got the foul stench of ‘American upset that other legal jurisdictions exist’ before I even finished the first sentence. The absolute slathering on of such emotive language feels very disingenuous. It’s immediately obvious that I’m being taken for some sort of ride. I can picture Kyle’s dad from South Park, at his computer, with his glass of red, writing his Yelp reviews. I genuinely don’t know how anyone can write like this and think that it’s a good look.
It is banal to observe that an agency of a government can act orthogonally to another, and also the citizens of the country.
I have noticed a trend post-2020 of a higher level of emotionality and impulsive thinking among government and business leaders in the United States. Hopefully thermostatic opinion engages and this trend reverses.
I am all for an open internet- I want to torrent US copyrighted content :)
Just by looking at the profile picture my douchebag detecting spidey-senses were tingling. And reading further down the text with people he brings up as he cries for mommy... ding ding ding!
Since when Cloudflare started to fight for Open Internet? Thanks to them last year we weren’t able to visit many websites. If that’s how they perceive openness, they have to think twice.
His whole #freespeech theater would be slightly more convincing if they did not praise America's neo fascists in the same tweet and also if cloudflare did not work in, for example, China (where I guess they comply with local censorship).
It's fine to defend your profits but don't pretend you defend anything else.
Good, make it hurt. Saying this as a European.
Why I actually use American DNS etc, it is at least open by default often. EU loves to censor and hide.
“any sites a shadowy cabal of European media elites deemed against their interests”
Does anyone else find it difficult to discern truth in this era where everyone seems to want to pray in your emotions. My gut is that he’s angry for the right reasons, but it’s hard for me to trust anyone who tries to use the words “shadowy cabal” in a serious context.
More information:
> Italy’s communications regulator AGCOM imposed a record-breaking €14.2 million fine on Cloudflare after the company failed to implement the required piracy blocking measures. Cloudflare argued that filtering its global 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver would be "impossible" without hurting overall performance. AGCOM disagreed, noting that Cloudflare is not necessarily a neutral intermediary either. [...]
https://torrentfreak.com/italy-fines-cloudflare-e14-million-...
I respect and agree with Cloudflare's right to pursue the decisions that Matthew Prince outlined — even if it is used as retaliation or a threat. What has completely turned the tone of the message for me is appealing to Elon Musk & JD Vance for democratic values and free speech.
I can't really take it seriously when free speech and democracy are pretended to be important only when the interests of the political figures of the US admin or of Elon Musk are at stake. Those values are supposed to be enjoyed by everyone and followed through on, no matter whose agenda and interests they may harm (or improve) as a result. At this point, they are tools (or weapons) that are appealed to when one's interests (or opinions, or feelings) are threatened.
If we listen to JD Vance and Elon Musk, we get the idea that it's the leftists and brown immigrants and democrats and woke people who are making everything worse, inciting violence and terror, are a block to prosperity and advancement, a threat to Western civilization. And thus, free speech is important to only further repeat and consolidate these points. The other way around cannot be entertained even as a possibility. They are exempt, for they are free of such flaws and imperfections.
It is a difficult balance to keep between universal values, such as democracy and free speech, and one's own interests, such as political and financial. I would want to see more honesty than a pretense of complete devotion to these values. No one is. I am not, for that matter.
I don't buy into Matthew Prince's appeal to free speech and democracy, but I am open to happily changing my mind in an incident where Cloudflare consequently takes an action that would harm the interests of said figures in a meaningful (not symbolic) way.
So now in Europe we can now also download all Hollywood movies for free? Because of the open internet?
>Using global revenue is further example of the extra-judicial overreach
Thank companies that transferred their national revenue via shady tax evation tricks into other countries so that their national revenue was nearly zero.
Oh how far eastdakota has fallen. What is it with billionaires losing their damn mind the wealthier they become?
And they all seem to love LOTR while acting just like Gollum.
There was a gas leak on the island.
As an Italian with little interest in watching soccer (pirated or not), I have just read AGCOM's decision and it provides a bit more context (although with typical legalese language):
- right holders used the piracy shield platform to report Cloudflare-owned IP/FQDNs used for piracy streaming
- Italian anti-piracy law mandates that "IT service providers" (rough translation) have to comply with AGCOM orders by enforcing blocks at the DNS or IP level or with other technical or organizational measures
- in 2024, AGCOM told Cloudflare to appoint someone in charge of these matters, highlighted that a lot of piracy websites use Cloudlfare, and invited Cloudflare to join itself the piracy shield platform
- again in 2024, following additional notes explicitly sent to Cloudflare (apparently via snail mail, but I guess it's for legal reasons) and published on AGCOM website, AGCOM also invited Cloudflare to join the "Technical Board" of Piracy Shield, basically the forum where ISPs discuss technical aspects of how Piracy Shield is actually implemented
- in 2025, AGCOM told CF to block certain IPs. CF didn't reply and AGCOM checked that those IPs were not blocked (surprise? I guess?), so AGCOM formally told CF they were violating the law. AGCOM also asked CF and Guardia di Finanza (Italian police specialized in fiscal/financial matters) to report CF's European and Italian sales figures. CF gave these data (which are redacted in the public AGCOM document).
- CF replied with a long list of observations, essentially saying that 1) CF hasn't joined piracy shield so they don't know which IPs should be blocked, 2) there is a pending hearing at the TAR (the court responsible for complaints against government/public entities/regulators decisions), 3) CF has no technical way to "know, control, modify or interfere in any way" with the content published by its customers, 4) even if blocked by CF the website is still online, 5) setting up a DNS filter will be very complicated and will impact performance (latency)
- AGCOM argued that 1) yes, CF hasn't joined piracy shield but it also didn't accept the invitation to join its technical board and, anyway, when it asked CF to block certain IPs it actually listed them, 2) AGCOM is not accusing CF of violating copyright laws, but of not complying with these piracy shield measures and, because CF actually didn't block those IPs, there is no need to wait for the other court hearing. In addition, other court hearings have considered CF responsible when illegal websites are hosted using its services, because of the reverse proxy service (basically, the CDN itself) and the fact that CF services can optimize performance and allow users to reach a website even when it's blocked (I think they're talking about their 1.1.1.1 DNS), 3) over 11 years, CF received a lot of notes from AGCOM because of domains hosted/protected by CF, but never challenged them, and in many cases CF was acting as reverse proxy for these domains (surprise?) 4) blocking these resources is mandated by law, and that resources not hosting illegal content anymore have been "unblocked" in the past, 5) CF has the technical knowledge to set up this kind of filters and should be organized to be able to comply with various laws and regulations.
I think this gives a bit more nuance. By the way, personally, I would argue that it's not true that CF has no technical way to "know, control, modify or interfere in any way" with the content, precisely because it acts as a giant reverse proxy/MITM. Arguing about the validity of this law (although the law was written by the parliament) or its implementation is one thing, but claiming that a CDN has no technical way to block resources seems a bit naive.
Thanks, it does give a bit more nuance.
Why cannot cloudlflare just apply a filter to the incoming requests and if the IP is belongs to am Italian AS they just drop it?
And if they can, can they please add my IP to that list as well.
Their dns service is used for circumventing illegal sports streams. And when a government institution wants to prevent that (ideally, before the end of that match) it is an evil cabal and cf is the protector of free internet and tags #elonmusk
This must be a joke.
banning them outside of italy is evil. Fining 200% of revenue from italy is evil too
Banning them or not banning them has nothing to do with evil, it has to do with due process. CF complies with lawful protection against piracy or gets tfo. For me, throwing a tantrum on twitter, riling people up and telling daddy elon doesn't change any of these definitions.
Reading this comment thread it’s now clear to me that HN is beyond any repair and is officially dead.
It’s fully transitioned to a political reactionary Reddit board devoid of any interesting discussion or insight.
Did it get too popular for its own good or has everyone just gone crazy?
In case people can’t/don’t want to read something on X, here is the statement:
Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined @Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet. The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any sites a shadowy cabal of European media elites deemed against their interests. No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency. It required us to not just remove customers, but also censor our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver meaning it risked blacking out any site on the Internet. And it required us not just to censor the content in Italy but globally. In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online.
That, of course, is DISGUSTING and even before yesterday’s fine we had multiple legal challenges pending against the underlying scheme. We, of course, will now fight the unjust fine. Not just because it’s wrong for us but because it is wrong for democratic values.
In addition, we are considering the following actions: 1) discontinuing the millions of dollars in pro bono cyber security services we are providing the upcoming Milano-Cortina Olympics; 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; 3) removing all servers from Italian cities; and 4) terminating all plans to build an Italian Cloudflare office or make any investments in the country.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. While there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration, I appreciate @JDVance taking a leadership role in recognizing this type of regulation is a fundamental unfair trade issue that also threatens democratic values. And in this case @ElonMusk is right: #FreeSpeech is critical and under attack from an out-of-touch cabal of very disturbed European policy makers.
I will be in DC first thing next week to discuss this with U.S. administration officials and I’ll be meeting with the IOC in Lausanne shortly after to outline the risk to the Olympic Games if @Cloudflare withdraws our cyber security protection.
In the meantime, we remain happy to discuss this with Italian government officials who, so far, have been unwilling to engage beyond issuing fines. We believe Italy, like all countries, has a right to regulate the content on networks inside its borders. But they must do so following the Rule of Law and principles of Due Process. And Italy certainly has no right to regulate what is and is not allowed on the Internet in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Brazil, India or anywhere outside its borders.
THIS IS AN IMPORTANT FIGHT AND WE WILL WIN!!!
It's not "quasi-judicial". They have no judicial authority, at all, despite how they present themselves.
They can only show them their supposed findings to a ministerial judge and tell them "Weeeh weeh, Cloudflare is being mean".
Then the judge will look at the AGCOM analysis, listen to Cloudflare or an EU representative or whoever may raise an objection to those findings, and then, after a loooooong time, enforce or not the fine.
"Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome." - Charlie Munger
I think the fine is wrong, but the attempt to weaponise JD Vance and Elon Musk doesn’t look well at all. The next time they see something they don’t like hosted/protected by Cloudflare they will only have to ask more or less nicely and there is a good chance Cloudflare will handle it for them
The interesting part is that neither the AGCOM nor Cloudflare quite understand how each other really work. Also they both believe they got more leeway than they truly have.
AGCOM is an institutional apparatus, they operate separately, but not independently, from whatever leftwing or rightwing government in charge for the most part (past Berlusconian interests aside) and everything they do is entirely subject to not getting out of the guidelines imposed by the EU, no matter what they want anyone else to believe.
Frankly the best course of action for Cloudflare would be getting in touch with the Board of European Regulation pointing them out that AGCOM is, probably for the hundreth time I guess, overstepping their authority. And they should stop right there, otherwise they're the ones that will be actually fined.
Well put. Several nuances are most likely lost in translation. Nevertheless the Cloudflare CEO took it as an opportunity to out himself as a buffoon and harming Cloudflare's international reputation.
They clearly have way more in common than expected.
Hell, I think AGCOM will probably rescind the fine for the sole reason they found out someone who's taking them seriously for the first time.
Geoblock all of Italy
> To effectively tackle live sports piracy,
Of course it's about football/calcio. I love Italy and almost everything related to Italy (I'm a Juventus fan to boot), but in this the Italian officials are way out of their element and behind the times.
No matter the merit of the claim, the appeal to the fascists in the US government invalidates any legitimacy.
And that is an achievement given how moronic the current Italian government is.
I find the "censorship" frame funny. This is happening because certain countries in Europe are governed by soccer oligarchs instead of big tech.
Choose your poison, I guess.
Fortunately I can ignore soccer, big tech however, not so much.
I mean just banning stuff because some media companies want it is brain dead, but immediately calling for daddy Vance and mommy Musk is just pathetic.
That's a pretty bad take. This whole situation came into existence because CF has positioned itself as a convenient choke point. The Italian government is dumb, but 'eastdakota' is being dumber here. JD Vance and Musk are about as poisonous to international relations as it gets and bringing them up in relation with Europe making and enforcing its own laws - no matter how misguided - makes me think you should probably focus on the beam in your own eye first.
As for the rest of the threats: please do. Europe needs less, not more dependencies on USD and US companies. We'll figure it out, or not.
There are many European CDN providers. Cloudflare is nowhere near as critical to the internet as HN crowd would suggest.
If a company choses Cloudflare they would have great service everywhere except Italy. If they chose a service with lower quality / reach, they will suffer degraded service across the board. If they try to use more than one CDN that’s a lot of hassle.
It’s not clear which way the decisions will go in reality. Past experience suggests that tech companies eventually accommodate local laws, trading complexity of explaining this to customers for complexity of implementing targeted blocking tools.
A lot depends on the next couple of months and the US's continued belligerence against - former? - allies. If that isn't toned down, and drastically so then I expect there to be many more consequences than just for CDN providers.
They're at 82% or so of all websites using CDNs, other providers are extremely small in comparison. CF is this large because of a feedback loop with respect to being able to deal with large denial of service attacks. They are - for most serious players - the only game in town now.
It might not be a conspiracy theory. Europeans have serious media skeletons in there closet.
Consider La Liga in Spain. When football matches are on they have a blank check to block whatever they want wherever they want. Genuinely they take down all of cloudflare and all kinds of shit. I think they were even DNS banning everyone on .tv TLD. Its wild how much legal power they have.
This was brought up on hacker news often.
They also have their apps spy on users microphones and gps to detect where someone might be watching their streams to make sure you aren't doing it in bars. [1]
Italian media is trying to do similar stuff with their piracy shield stuff. [2]
AtomicDig219303 on Reddit when Italy blocked all of google drive.
> Wait, I don't think that your post describes how fucking idiotic this whole thing is. Piracy shield is a system implemented by AGCOM (which as OP said is a governing agency) and basically "gifted" to the fucking mafia that is Serie A (yes, the football/soccer league) to block access to pirated streams of football matches.
[0] https://reclaimthenet.org/laligas-anti-piracy-crackdown-trig...
[1] https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/06/12/inenglish/15603...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1mgq41i/italys_pira...
Don't forget Robert Maxwell...
He is partially right. The Atlanticist faction in both the US and Europe has been working to get the internet under control since 2016. This project started as a backlash to the Trump election and moved into high gear with COVID and Ukraine. This faction has a sincere belief that the prior openness of the internet is a threat to the international order, as it prevents authorities from shaping civilian perceptions and behavior.
The battlefield has become more complex since 2016, as the old international order is pretty much dead now, so you have competing factions of Atlanticists (US rump admin/UK/FR/DE/Brussels) versus nationalists (US/Israel/Eastern Europe) who both want control of the internet, but through different means and for different reasons. You could also tack on BRICS nations who decided that the best path is to wall themselves off from the open internet.
Go ahead and downvote, you know I’m right which is why you won’t offer even a single comment in response.
Each of these factions trying to kill the open internet is doing it for selfish reasons and all are in the wrong for doing so. You’re strangling an international commons for your geopolitical games. Shame on all of you!
He contradicts himself in the span of a single sentence. How is it possible that this was done solely by Italy (with concerns from the rest of the EU) and yet this is the work of a cabal of European media elites? If this were true, why isn't the entire EU involved?
Italy and Spain are doing the same thing and there may be other EU countries being controlled by football leagues that I haven't heard of.
> there may be
Indeed, but there may not be. so maybe don't base any strong opinions on that kind of logic.
That's not really a self-contradiction; if we pretend the USA's copyright lobby had made California pass a similar law… well, that might not work, I have no idea if that would be unconstitutional inter-state trade restriction or something in the USA, but for the sake of showing why it's not a self-contradiction can we pretend?
If the US media elites had convinced California to do that, they'd be a "shadowy cabal of [US] media elites", even if there was opposition from the rest of the USA.
Again, don't read too much into if this would actually work in the USA, the EU is not the USA, this isn't that kind of comment.
It's not that long ago that US media conglomerates used MPAA to threaten Sweden to remove piratebay?
Sure, but Sweden isn't in the US so I don't see that illustrating anything in this analogy.
US media elites got DMCA and YouTubes copyright strike introduced, I suppose they were powerful enough to sidestep the states and go after Congress instead.
This is a continuation of LaLiga vs Cloudflare in Spain. Spaniards are just blocking the whole CF IP ranges during the broadcast of important sports games, shutting down half the internet altogether. Italians are trying another way.
I can't ad hoc the best solution for all, but asking for help from Elon Musk and JD Vance, two prominent borderline fascist figures of our time, is disturbing.
Another reason to dump an american big tech firm and switch to Bunny.net for example. Better a democratic based error than an american greed based CEO.
Wow that guy does not sound like what in my head a Cloudflare CEO sounds like. Win stupid prizes? Bro...
Seriously. If only he had a professional comms team who could help him craft a message that didn't read like... that.
I got the impression that he might be trying to imitate Trump's communication style as part of his appeal to the US administration throwing its weight behind him here. Particularly given the image attachment at the end. It's difficult to imagine that nobody qualified double checked this before he posted it.
Elon Musk the bastion of free speech who famously banned a twitter account that posted publicly available information.
One? Elon banned thousands after he took over.
He event went as far as personally canceling a Tesla customer's order for criticizing him. That's how petty he is. He has no interest in freedom of speech whatsoever, it's merely a talking point.
Me included, not that I'm very interesting. Every time I asked why I got a different reason from support.
Edit: the last reason given was 'impersonation', which I thought was pretty random
I disagree.
Freedom of Speech guarantees the right to speak. Not the right to have no repercussions.
Elon has GREAT interest in Freedom of Speech, it enables him to have far more power than regulating the type of "speech" he showed in cancelling that customer's order.
Elon has interest in monetary gain and stirring conflicts around the world. It is sad that individuals like you are drunk on his coolaid.
> Freedom of Speech guarantees the right to speak. Not the right to have no repercussions.
How is that different from, say, Freedom of Theft guaranteeing the right to steal, but not the right to have no repercussions?
By these definitions, everyone has these “rights”?
he's controlling the speech, not freeing it
try posting "cisgender" on xhitter
Besides attempting to get him murdered by a crazy person seeing a chance to be famous, what possible reason does someone have to constantly broadcast the location of his transportation? What difference does knowing where it or he is make in the daily lives of anyone? What long term planning does the information give to people?
In the case of private plane info, to highlight hypocrisy regarding the eco-friendly identity he was at that time seemingly trying to curate.
Musk is a contrarian. He, however, is not a government body (nor does he represent one, u can choose to include the dubious Doge efforts into the discussion but that will devolve into semantics that do not negate the point). As a private citizen with a platform for which he overpaid - he can do as he pleases within the confines of said platform. Musk, however, cannot enforce fines on other providers and request stuff from them. This is what the post is about.
He can do whatever he wants on that platform. Equally, can elected officials decide to ban that private platform?
Again, apples and oranges. Private citizens vs government. Musk has no power given to him by someone, the government does, using that power in a way that might be considered abusive/authoritarian might yield (deserved) backlash.
I'm not sure if I'm not getting something. It's a for-profit organization vs a government entity. It's not even remotely similar.
If someone says they believe in free speech, they have to let me spraypaint anything I want on their house. Otherwise they're a hypocrite.
If they publicly state that the house is a "town square" (he has said that of twitter), and they say that they are a "free speech absolutist" (he has said this of himself in the context of this house/town square/website), and state that "By 'free speech,' I simply mean that which matches the law.", then yes, if they don't let you spray-paint (tweet) whatever you want that's not strictly unlawful (like, ah, calling for civil disorder in the UK?), they are indeed a hypocrite.
When the house is digital (twitter is), why even use spray paint as the analogy?
Can't throw rotten tomatoes at internet nazis in the nazi "town square" unfortunately.
When Musk bought twitter, he all-but-explicitly said "I have finally bought this house, which I will let anyone spray paint".
And then promptly started to ban terms like "cis-gendered".
except for trans people and all the people he banned that disagree with him
Italy can use the same argument.
Intellectually dishonest analogy but I’m sure you already know this.
I'm sure there are popular Italian websites behind CloudFlare. Say, train tickets. Probably not, but just for the sake of the argument.
1. Order comes to block address 69.69.69.69 within 30 minutes
2. Quickly switch Trenitalia to 69.69.69.69. Which is fine, because CloudFlare probably doesn't promise you any specific IP address, so they can assign them from the pool as they please.
3. Block 69.69.69.69.
4. In the whole country everyone who tries to buy a train ticket or check the schedule sees "train service doesn't work because football, please try again after the match", effectively paralyzing public transport.
5. Average Giuseppe learns about the ridiculousness of the situation and gets upset.
6. The government suddenly has to explain to the people what happened. They cannot pin the blame on CloudFlare (as per current fine), so the only remaining scapegoat is the football association.
7. The entire bus stands up clapping.
>Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online. That, of course, is DISGUSTING
What's equally disgusting is that one corporation has managed to put itself in the position to dictate these things instead. Cloudflare has literally been running a denial of service on congress.gov (any many other important domains) for at least 3 years if you aren't running latest chrome or latest firefox or similar.
Like a broken clock, he's not wrong. But it's the pot calling the kettle black.
Damn, that’s a pretty disappointing statement. Some parts are correct but then he goes completely overboard. After everything that has been happening the past year with the new administration it’s hard to keep supporting this as a European.
Will move our startup from Cloudflare.
While he has a point and Italians are kinda embarrassing in their politics, can't help the feeling that he comes off as a bit of cry-baby. Trying to win points with the JD/Musk mafia that hard seems weird and icky. Seems like signaling to other billionaire bros that they belong to their faction, which in my books isn't that great either. That last uppercase line a cherry on top of shattering my image of CF as respectable tech-vendors.
I flagged this for being a link to a site which produces and condones CSAM. Let’s keep this garbage off of HN.
looks like, he didn't pay enough for bribes
Europe's censorious behavior has become completely absurd, and reading the Italian docs (as several people here have already shared) doesn't make me more sympathetic. It's a real shame, and I'm disappointed that the dream of an internet free from censorship and manipulation seems to be forgotten by so many here - in favor of political squabbling.
I was nodding along in agreement until he inserted his tongue into Musk and Vance. A little bit of sick came up.
By "shadowy cabal of European media elites," is Prince referring to elected Italian officials? What have they asked Cloudflare to ban?
No. To private entities (news outlets) who, according to this law, get to decide what websites to ban without a court order or any due process
The exact same thing is implemented in Germany already (DNS-level block), and I did not see Cloudflare CEO rage posting on Twitter about it.
"you must block things in germany after it goes through a formal government process" versus "you must block things globally even for places not subject to italian law because an italian media company doesn't like it"
There's more than a subtle difference betweeen the two.
Has Germany tried to fine Cloudflare over it?
I'm in Germany and Cloudflare DNS doesn't Block eg Annas Archive for me, while my ISP does. I also don't reckon Germany tried to fine Cloudflare yet. So what is your point?
Because the German law only harms Germans, whereas the Italian law in question demands global bans.
The driving force behind this is getting pirated streams of football matches knocked offline. Currently by the time any action is taken the match is over, which is why they want the response-within-30-minutes.
This is about football streaming, the cabal media elites are right holders fighting illegal streams, which 1.1.1.1 bypasses even if filters are put at the ISP level.
Fascists catfighting fascists. Entertaining, but a sign of the shitstorm we're all in for soon.
Soon?
I read through that and I'm not a fan of Cloudflare. I live in the EU, I dislike the increased control that the EU keeps desiring - but generally we've fought it with various degrees of success. I feel it's a bit disingenuous to act like the US has total internet freedom since you're the folks that invented ISP letters. Regardless of that, what really bugged me was the threat of removing the free-tier service for any Italy based accounts, which despite being fully in their right to do, is a shitty thing to threaten with - and it's shocking he would threaten that so easily.
So yes, my reaction is now to move all of my shit from Cloudflare as soon as possible because I don't see CF as a reliable partner right now after that tantrum.
As a side note: just today Polish president veto'ed a law that would allow similar government power. The government coalition instantly turned on "think of the children" rhetoric in response. I think they are misreading the public sentiment on this one though.
This tweet is unhinged and disappointing. Another techbro billionaire. I've sold what little stock I had in Cloudflare and will be moving off their services.
Any askers?
> quasi-judicial
the tweet starts off pretty strong, which I didn't care for but I understand. this phrase however feels wrong. i guess i don't understand Italy, but isn't this like saying the SEC or FCC is quasi-judicial?
> In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online.
ah, unlike when CF themselves decides unilaterally, not even as part of a cabal, what should and should not be allowed online. got it.
of course cloudflare deplatformed some without any court involved. it would be a whole lot more honest if they had not shown their true colors
Threatens retaliation against the individuals in Italy directly on top of the government, and I notice he specified "based in Italy" not "Italian citizen".
Then goes on to thank JD Vance, and crow about Elon "I censor anyone who offends my ego" Musk as being right on Free Speech being in danger.
Also the "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." which sounds synonymous with FAFO which this admin is using to mean "if you resist us, we will hurt you"
If he had just said that Cloudflare is unwilling to comply with these terms and is leaving the Italian market as such, that would be one thing, but this reads like he just ordered his MAGA hat and is going to suck up to the current admin to get them to pressure another country.
Lets add the hypocrisy here too, since he says that countries shouldn't regulate outside their borders, and is then running to Uncle Same for support
> "I will be in DC first thing next week to discuss this with U.S. administration officials...
> We believe Italy, like all countries, has a right to regulate the content on networks inside its borders. But they must do so following the Rule of Law and principles of Due Process. And Italy certainly has no right to regulate what is and is not allowed on the Internet in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Brazil, India or anywhere outside its borders.
> I appreciate @JDVance taking a leadership role in recognizing this type of regulation is a fundamental unfair trade issue that also threatens democratic values. And in this case @ElonMusk is right: #FreeSpeech is critical and under attack from an out-of-touch cabal of very disturbed European policy makers.
Pretending to take a principled stand against censorship but then randomly throwing flowers to two of the biggest threats to freedom of expression is deeply hypocritical, and makes it really hard to take his reaction seriously. And let's not forget that really vile AI image that is sure to alienate all Italians against Cloudflare.
He knows the only way he wins this is if the current US Administration goes to bat for him.
At this point, I'm wondering to what extent all this batting is driving the EU calls for digital sovereignty, and to what extent those calls will be turned into actions.
EU can't build so if they firewall themselves from the US they'll just have a pretty empty Internet.
The other night I was thinking about graphene. Not the OS, the material.
- https://innovationedge.com/2010/10/13/graphene-patent-geim/So, we absolutely can get stuff done, the Americans just keep buying us up (DeepMind) or stealing it or using initimidation (Graphene) or espionage (of Airbus for benefit of Boeing way back).
We actually have websites in Europe, including the very first one.
We had more before Reddit and Metabook centralised so many.
I think we will be fine thanks
EU is extremely good at "calling for" things to happen. I haven't seen a single one of those things actually happen.
He can't win this, at best he can quit Italy and not offer any services there.
Which will makes any non-US company reconsider using Cloudflare real quick.
Indeed, but that doesn't mean I have to be fine with that. He already had a perfectly good case against that fine, but using the occasion to cozy up to actual fascists completely discredits him to anyone serious.
I don’t know the backstory but Cloudflare arguing for an open internet is super ironic, presumably he means they want the be the one to close it off and are upset that someone else is ruining their monopoly on it.
Definitely getting that vibe. Also praising M*sk and USA leadership clearly points to only having his business interests in mind.
Feels like engagement bait for attention seeking. No doubt they'll still keep the Olympics contracts as they are.
1.1.1.1 DNS is just querying root DNS servers. And @elon.jet twitter account was just querying ADS data and posting it. Its exactly same, yet this guy praises Elon.
DNS lookups via 1.1.1.1 are also directly fed into the US surveillance state so peter thiel can use his palantir dashboard to see if you are the antichrist or not.
I'm sure he has a mirror lying around somewhere?
Is agreeing with an adversary on a single point the same as praising them?
Interesting choice of words to try and make the logic sound ok. Try:
'Is praising an adversary on a single issue the same as praising them'. Yes, yes it is
Here's the backstory:
A government agency in Italy which is known nation-wide to complain and fine other institutions for the stupidest and pettiest reasons, fined another institution for a stupid and petty reason. But of course, ignorant people just see this single occurrence and make up conspiracy theories about it. (Really, if you looked at some examples of previous fines and complaints by AGCOM you would laugh your ass off independently of your political stance)
USian tech-CEO posting petulant self-serving arguments about "FREEDOM" on twitter? what a cliche
cloudflare have deliberately designed their network so that every IP can serve up every cloudflare website
this means a court order can't block a single cloudflare site without blocking every cloudflare site, causing massive collateral damage
I suspect this is a deliberate business decision: an attempt to raise the "cost" of blocking so high that courts won't attempt to do it at all
and then they make arguments about "it's not technically possible", when it is (farm the target of the orders off to a separate pool of IPs)
and for DNS they could apply a filter based on the source IP country of origin
Prince: please, please, please exercise your empty threat, and withdraw your shitty company's services from Italy
and then you'll watch as Italy then raises it at the EU level, and then you'll have to do the same there too
> this means a court order can't block a single cloudflare site without blocking every cloudflare site
Not true. Cloudflare can't block only a single web site _by IP address_ but that's pretty common with IPv4, The same is true of Fastly and AWS and I'd be shocked if there's a mass-market CDN out there that has a unique IPv4 address per customer.
They can absolutely block any site they want at the application layer (SNI or Host header or whatever they use, IDK, I'm a network guy).
> I'd be shocked if there's a mass-market CDN out there that has a unique IPv4 address per customer.
fortunately you only need to farm out the ones out that are under court orders
> They can absolutely block any site they want at the application layer (SNI or Host header or whatever they use, IDK, I'm a network guy).
these court orders usually work by getting end user ISPs (which are regulated) to block or reroute the IP and/or DNS entry
neither of which can be realistically done due to conscious decisions by cloudflare
I honestly don't see the irony. I believe Cloudflare tries to argue for an open internet. I use some of their features on the free plan and it's of tremendous help, especially considering the price I pay (ie 0$). I'm actually super glad that Cloudflare exists.
So you think it's fine that if some Italian agency orders Cloudflare to block some domain on it's 1.1.1.1 public DNS (or Google on it's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) it should be blocked for everyone on Earth who is using this DNS server, including yourself? And if you think otherwise, you are merely "upset that someone else is ruining their monopoly on it"?
Is Matthew also pro-CSAM or is there some other reason to namedrop Elon Musk right now?
I suspect the "we're an American company and we're going to get the government protection racket to threaten you" gambit isn't going to achieve the results he's hoping for.
I was reading through this and at first I saw Italy as the bad guys, demanding ridiculous asks. The moment the "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." nonsense appeared, followed right after by callouts to Vance and Musk, and threats that he's going to stomp his little feet to the administration...good god, this is pathetic. He looks like a clown. A snivelling, whiny, entitled clown.
lol, ban Cloudflare from Europe. Honestly, at this point all American companies should be banned everywhere but the US, as every American oligarch like this guy does this "We're American gosh darnit!" bit while this administration talks about annexing allies. Disgusting, deplorable behaviour.
So you saw the truth first, then your ego got bruised?
Two things can be true-
a) sovereign nations can impose literally any rule they want on foreign businesses, even if those rules are ridiculous, arbitrary, or defy the "freedom" values of some other country.
b) This incredibly tired "I'm telling Daddy Trump!" bit is pathetic, and it, among with the fact that America is currently -- by far -- the most dangerous country on the planet, should yield garbage people like Price getting their ass handed to them.
Another C-suite having a meltdown because their self-perceived power is not ubiquitous
Makes sense to me. Italy is going to fine them. Then Italy can build their own service.
He lost me when he started thanking fascists (Vance, Musk et al) who are actively attacking speech in the US they don't agree with. The hypocrisy is unbearable.
> We believe Italy, like all countries, has a right to regulate the content on networks inside its borders. But they must do so following the Rule of Law and principles of Due Process. I really couldn’t care less about your legal philosophy, mate. I understand that you’re used to corporations setting the rules, and I’m sure that it brought you such great joy to write a little post where you got to flex about being well-connected with your country’s morally corrupt administration. However, your views on whether or not a country had a right to self-regulation, have zero impact on your obligation to comply. You don’t get to parachute in and set your own terms. Do you really think that your childish threats of ‘pulling your free plan’ and ‘not opening an office’ will have the intended effect? I genuinely can’t work out why someone didn’t tap this kid on the shoulder and suggest that he tone his rant down a bit.
The US is a sick, sick country. Nowhere else does anyone have the misplaced confidence to act this insanely stupid.
Really like the forthrightness.
I do appreciate reading a PR, from a CEO, that's not unsalvageably tone deaf. At the first half, I was wondering what the point of this was, given if Italy thinks this is something they're allowed to apply across the globe. That instantly makes this a political issue they probably need to be talking to the State Department about. Then I got to the 2nd half, and was impressed that I wasn't immediately annoyed by the ass kissing.
I assume Cloudflare has a great PR team because this feels like a master class in rhetoric. Given how you're expected to solicit help these days.
Rhetoric aside, it'll be interesting to see how the whole thing plays out. Italy seems to have taken out a hammer, and their d.... well, I'm just gonna hope the Internet wins this one.
> was impressed that I wasn't immediately annoyed by any ass kissing.
Did it only annoy you after reading it again?
He should be careful, a third reading and he might start to enjoy it.
No? In a disagreement with Italy, cloudflare is definitely going to need the intervention of the US administration. This (angry Twitter post) is how you're expected to ask for help in this timeline. I was expecting to annoyed with the faux allegiance. But here, I think they communicated their distain over the behavior as best as they could, while still asking for help.
I might not like it, but I understand it.
Equally, I might be wrong; but this feels to me like the post tries to as subtly as possible communicate that they have problems with the administration (my expectations for anyone who is at all ethical) While still also needing their help. And if I'm wildly incorrect; and cloudflare is actually in love with the administration, then it's still a master class in rhetoric, because they tricked me, which was probably the point?
no offense, but this seems to me like a tantrum. I'd say a far cry from rhetoric, let alone a masterclass.
For the first couple of paragraphs, I almost agreed with this dope. Thought he was a moderate on the wrong side of things after the next couple of paragraphs, and after the AI-generated anime picture, I'm pretty sure the guy is a groyper.