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.

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.

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.

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.

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)?

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.

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.

  a private US company pushing their current political views on another sovereign state

BunnyCDN is a good contender for the network. They can find another provider for cybersec.

How is the rights holder verified in 30 minutes?

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

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...

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?

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"

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 is no such thing as "no judicial oversight" in Germany.

> 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.

> 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.

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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.

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".

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?

Pretty good, thanks for asking!

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.

> 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?

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).

Similar to what Democrats have done to Trump: https://nypost.com/2024/05/12/us-news/fareed-zakaria-doubts-...

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.

> Western Europe is not an authoritarian dystopia by any measure

People are locked up in the Germany and the UK because they criticize the government, its politicians or their policies. I live in Germany.

> Economic growth or lack of thereof is absolutely irrelevant here

It absolutely is. Being right (and more so, being righteous) is expensive. When you cannot afford to put your money where your mouth is, everyone knows that sooner or later you cannot or will not follow through on your words. Europe hast lost ~30% of power vs. the US in just ~12 years.

I mean they've certainly turned their back on classic western values like free speech and expression.

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...

> 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 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?

Yes 100% they absolutely do.

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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)