[HN Gopher] Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy ...
___________________________________________________________________
Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law
Author : DanAtC
Score : 81 points
Date : 2025-03-22 19:46 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| Kenji wrote:
| DOH is your friend. My regime poisons DNS and enabling DOH makes
| things accessible again.
| geoffpado wrote:
| Serious question: how is DoH supposed to help when the resolver
| itself is being asked to return bad results? DoH makes sense if
| something is MITM-ing your DNS requests, but it sounds in this
| case that Google is being asked to just straight-up return bad
| results?
| mantas wrote:
| DOH over proxy to pretend you're elsewhere?
| Nux wrote:
| DoH some other resolver, there's an internet outside Google,
| you know.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| Exactly. In a world of many resolvers, poisoning a few
| doesn't matter. In all likelihood the folks consuming these
| streams aren't using mainstream DNS anyway.
| vhcr wrote:
| DoH over Tor
| xxmarkuski wrote:
| DNSSEC is the actual solution, providing authenticity and
| integrity for DNS records. The DNS client can verify that the
| received DNS response is what the zone admin intended.
| Additional records (NSEC / NSEC3) are used to provide a proof
| of non-existence, preventing suppression from a mitm
| attacker. But if your government is mitming you, you don't
| want them to see you use DNSSEC. DoH is useful in that case,
| because a mitm sees only https traffic, which is less
| suspicious than DoT.
| crote wrote:
| DNSSEC isn't going to _prevent_ suppression, it just makes
| it detectable. Cloudflare is still going to send you a
| doctored record - which will fail verification. But that
| doesn 't magically give you an undoctored record,
| unfortunately.
| thayne wrote:
| I think the actual reason this works is because if you use
| DoH, you are probably also setting your resolver to something
| other than the default, which might not be poising the
| records.
|
| So the real answer to governments requiring dns resolvers to
| censor results is to ... not use those resolvers. which is
| actually relatively easy to do. But most internet users don't
| even know what a dns resolver is, much less how to configure
| their browser to use a public resolver that isn't big enough
| to attract the attention of your government.
| miki123211 wrote:
| It would not.
|
| You'd need a resolver that was provided by a foreign
| organization, preferably a non-profit, with no business
| interests in your country whatsoever, so that your government
| had nothing to threaten them with if they didn't comply with
| the order.
|
| Such a resolver would also need to be the default shipped
| with at least one major browser, such that blocking it would
| essentially mean "turning off the internet" for some users.
|
| Then the pressure would move to forcing browsers to use a
| different DNS resolver, and the game would continue.
| djoldman wrote:
| > This decision follows a similar case against Internet backbone
| firm Cloudflare. In January, the Court of Milan found that
| Cloudflare's CDN, DNS server, and WARP VPN were facilitating
| piracy. The court threatened Cloudflare with fines of up to
| 10,000 euros per day if it did not begin blocking the sites.
|
| I'm always curious about jurisdiction on this stuff.
|
| If Cloudflare had no physical machines, employees, and property
| within Italy's borders, under what law could Italy levy a fine?
| miohtama wrote:
| The EU companies make payments to Cloudflare, and these could
| be confiscated. Also any staff in Italy is in danger.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| The question clearly stated the assumption that there is no
| staff in Italy. Also the payments cannot be confiscated
| unless they are made to Italian banks, which makes no sense
| if they don't have a branch there, so if the payments are
| made to US, there is no way to confiscate by the Italian
| authorities.
| nukem222 wrote:
| Presumably italian courts could seize payments made by
| italian clients of cloudflare, yes? Even if the account is
| located well outside of italy, the owners can be compelled
| by legal means.
|
| (To some degree of effectiveness, to be sure. But I have a
| hard time imagining there are no clients registered in
| italy at all.)
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| The payment is done, money is at Cloudflare in a US bank,
| Cloudflare takes it and move it somewhere else. How do
| they seize it? The money is gone and it's not coming
| back.
| nukem222 wrote:
| Assuming the client is an italian company, as would make
| sense in this thread, they would issue a court order
| compelling the corporation to comply with domestic law or
| get fined (or worse, idk, this is all speculative).
| Presumably the ask would be handing over control of the
| client's bank account for the needs of the court
| fulfilling its duties moving forward from the court
| order.
|
| Edit: corrected mistake about whose account would be
| within the court's grasp.
| rvnx wrote:
| It's more simple, imagine Cloudflare is used to show
| pedophile content, and refuses to remove it. Then the
| solution is to cut access to Cloudflare.
|
| That's the logic here. It's not about whether they have
| offices or not, but whether they are distributing content
| to users in Italy.
|
| There is always a local relay or ISP in Italy that offers
| access to Cloudflare, and this relay can be coerced into
| blocking Cloudflare.
|
| Of course 1% of people may be able to access otherwise
| (for example, via Starlink or VPNs), but the objective is
| to block 90%+ of the traffic, so Cloudflare reconsiders
| following local laws.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Connections to foreign computers are not subjected to
| regulation currently.
| bakugo wrote:
| Unfortunately, even if we ignore the fact that Cloudflare
| probably has many Italian customers, there are other ways they
| can interfere with Cloudflare's services, such as by blocking
| their IP addresses in the country. It wouldn't be the first
| time this has been done by European ISPs, sadly.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Is that a problem for Cloudflare or with Italy? In the end,
| can Italy break Internet or can Internet cut off Italy? It is
| a theoretical question, I wonder how much control countries
| can have over a non-country level concept as Internet. The
| jurisdiction question is very much the point, does Cloudflare
| or Google provide a paid DNS service to Italian clients and
| the contract is regulated by Italian laws or it is a
| universal and free DNS service that Italy cannot regulate?
| theow939494 wrote:
| Many many years ago there was a case, when youtube showed
| school bullying video from Italy, in recommended content, for
| several weeks.
|
| If I remember correctly, Italy criminally charged some YT
| execs, and asked Interpol to get them.
| Etheryte wrote:
| I'm not sure how there's any ambiguity to this? We're talking
| about the EU here. The same laws that enable you to do business
| across borders without having a legal presence in every country
| also outline how to deal with issues like these.
| Aachen wrote:
| What do you mean what law? See the court case, they've issued
| it and so they can either pay it or see what Italy wants to do
| about it
|
| If you get a speeding ticket in North Korea and fly off before
| it arrives at the car rental, you can ask what law the rental
| is going to use to get the money from you abroad. You can not
| pay and choose to never visit the country again. In
| Cloudflare's case, however, they probably want to continue
| doing business in that market so just fleeing with the money is
| not likely the most profitable option for them
|
| There's tons of international cases if you want to know more.
| It's also a common (to the point of trite) discussion point
| about GDPR saying it applies globally. Obviously it doesn't
| unless the non-treaty country lets an EU/EEA country enforce it
| (I am not aware that this ever happened) if the fined party
| does not care to continue doing business in the EEA
| miki123211 wrote:
| The point of Cloudflare is that it's widely available and that
| _your_ customers can connect to it. Italy could block
| Cloudflare access to Cloudflare for its citizens, which would
| make non-italian CF customers who have users in Italy extremely
| unhappy.
|
| Imagine an American SaaS company that uses Cloudflare CDN to
| distribute their assets and tunnels their traffic through CF
| for DoS mitigation. That company has paying customers in Italy.
| If Cloudflare gets blocked, that company's software no longer
| works in that country. They have a choice between switching to
| a different provider (which will make Cloudflare lose money)
| and telling their Italian customers to go away (which they
| don't want to do for obvious reasons).
|
| Considering how much infra actually relies on CF, Whether the
| Italian government would actually fight that fight is a
| different matter entirely. Sometimes centralization is a good
| thing.
|
| IMO, a far more interesting question is what would happen if
| Italy asked CF to block some content _worldwide_.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| CF blocking a whole country like this would be interesting...
| basically half the internet would stop working, probably a
| bunch of italian government stuff too, and people would
| hopefully blame the government, because i'm pretty sure there
| are almost zero italian voters who wanted this from their
| representatives.
|
| Sadly, companies bow down instead of just risk it once.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| That is a big 'if' though. Don't CDNs work by having equipment
| in every country so you don't have to?
| bakugo wrote:
| > The goal is aimed at preventing illegal football streams
|
| It's impressive how much internet censorship in Europe is
| currently being caused by this one group of extremely greedy
| people. It's one of the rare cases where the sheer size and
| international influence of companies like Google and Cloudflare
| can actually do some good for the world by fighting back against
| such laws.
| delroth wrote:
| > It's impressive how much internet censorship in Europe is
| currently being caused by this one group of extremely greedy
| people.
|
| How is this greedy? It's clearly illegal behavior, both from
| illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those re-
| broadcast services aren't even free either, they're directly
| making money from the broadcasts they're replicating.
|
| The problem is that we still haven't figured out a way to
| properly enforce laws on the internet. Even for completely
| egregious violations there's no way to do anything once you
| track down the website to a bulletproof host in Russia or
| Ukraine or similar countries that don't cooperate. After 20
| years of getting nowhere the courts have to find new and
| creative ways to enforce laws. I think everyone agrees that
| ideally this shouldn't be DNS blocks or IP blocks but rather
| these services getting removed from the internet and/or having
| to implement regional blocks to comply with laws. But there's
| just no way at all to make this happen right now.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _How is this greedy? It 's clearly illegal behavior, both
| from illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those
| re-broadcast services aren't even free either, they're
| directly making money from the broadcasts they're
| replicating._
|
| It's _both_. The re-broadcasters may be violating the laws
| _and_ laws themselves could be unjust, nonsensical, yet
| existing and enforced because of a group of greedy
| benefactors actively keeping them that way.
| bakugo wrote:
| > How is this greedy? It's clearly illegal behavior, both
| from illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those
| re-broadcast services aren't even free either, they're
| directly making money from the broadcasts they're
| replicating.
|
| Because piracy is a service problem. Pirate streaming sites
| attract users because they provide a better, more convenient
| service than the paid options.
|
| We've recently seen this happen in real time with TV/movie
| streaming services: If you simply tell users "Pay us this
| single, simple and affordable fee every month and we will
| provide you with unrestricted access to the content you want,
| whenever you want", the users will come. But then the
| investors come knocking. It's not enough that you made N
| money last quarter, you have to make N+1 next quater. The
| line has to go up. So the subscription prices go up, the
| number of subscriptions required to access everything goes
| up, you start getting ads even though your subscription was
| originally ad-free, and suddenly the service doesn't seem so
| appealing anymore.
|
| I've heard endless stories of people having to pay for
| multiple subscriptions just to watch all of their favorite
| team's games, and still missing out on some due to whatever
| new money-making scheme sports companies came up with this
| month. It's not hard to see why so many people resort to just
| going online and finding a pirate stream.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| So basically the problem is reduced to "how can Italy fight
| against a crime happening somewhere in Russia or Ukraine"?
| Imagine there is a TV broadcast from Russia, how can Italy
| forbid it? They can definitely disrupt it (by electronic
| jamming), but not forbit it. Similar to Internet, the
| difference is the medium of transmission, not the facts of
| the matter.
|
| In Communist times in my country I was watching cartoons
| broadcasted from the neighboring country. Adults were
| watching adult content at night from the same source. There
| was no way to stop that.
| timewizard wrote:
| > is currently being caused by this one group of extremely
| greedy people.
|
| You can be sure it's not limited to just them. This just
| appears to be the most publicized example because the
| government happens to be the unusual position that the entity
| under scrutiny has far more money and legal power than they do.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Mediterranean EU is all about lotteries, gambling, and
| football. Don't allow them to change anything related to how
| the internet works. It will be awful internet.
| perching_aix wrote:
| Am I correct in recognizing this as a _new_ low, or is there a
| prior example for such a demand?
| miohtama wrote:
| A Spanish judge ordered blocking of Telegram for the same
| reason.
|
| https://medium.com/enrique-dans/why-blocking-telegram-in-spa...
|
| It was reversed quickly on complaints, though.
| int_19h wrote:
| Right there in the article:
|
| "This decision follows a similar case against Internet backbone
| firm Cloudflare. In January, the Court of Milan found that
| Cloudflare's CDN, DNS server, and WARP VPN were facilitating
| piracy. The court threatened Cloudflare with fines of up to
| 10,000 euros per day if it did not begin blocking the sites."
| perching_aix wrote:
| I was specifically referring to requesting DNS poisoning.
| threeseed wrote:
| ISPs being asked by the government to block sites at the DNS
| level is very common.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| Why must the Europeans be like this? Why do they insist on
| fucking with a free and open internet instead of addressing the
| apparently unmet demand that is fueling a black market?
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Please, do not confuse Europeans with the entities taking such
| actions. I know of nobody supporting such draconian measures.
| However, the government, the football league and the guys
| taking decisions at agcom (which in the past has been a serious
| and respected agency for the battle he took with tech
| companies) are, quite apparently, banding together to make the
| football league will become reality above anything else
| stalfosknight wrote:
| While I generally agree that one should not conflate private
| individuals with the actions of their government, I do think
| it is fair to hold people who live in democracies responsible
| in a general or aggregate sense for the actions of their
| elected governments.
|
| In other words, I think it is fair to say that Italy pulls
| shit like this because enough Italian voters want it to
| happen or otherwise let it happen.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Heh, I partially agree with general politics, however
| actions like this are so distant from the average Joe that
| the chances are they do not even know the pros and cons of
| similar actions. One might argue that they can get
| informed, but once you get into technicalities like this,
| one should spend its entire free time getting informed on
| similar issues. I see a lack of general discourse about
| this - in the past it happened to have some Google drive
| urls blocked if I'm not wrong - because it is not perceived
| as an issue unless something big happens that (such as
| drive not working)
|
| You also have to add the fact that this issue goes
| relatively "unnoticed" compared to other issues that are
| perceived as much more important
| scns wrote:
| > I do think it is fair to hold people who live in
| democracies responsible in a general or aggregate sense for
| the actions of their elected governments.
|
| Are you american? Should you be held responsible for
| Trumps' and Musks' actions?
| drpossum wrote:
| Yeah! Didn't you know? Europe doesn't have elected leaders.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| I am not sure if I'm understanding what you're saying.
| Anyway.
|
| What I am against is equating leader's behavior and
| people's behavior. It's not a nazi Germany situation where
| the people supported this action, it's a situation where
| most people don't know about it, and those who know are
| probably against it. It's such a minor issue that until
| something very big will happen and go on the news, nobody
| will care about it since people are mostly trying to make a
| living without much thought about what happens outside
| their garden
| xvector wrote:
| Europeans consistently support a regulation regime that
| routinely pushes absurd tech policy. It sounds great to
| normies so it goes unresisted. But it's a complete fucking
| nightmare for anyone trying to actually build+ship anything.
| miki123211 wrote:
| For one simple reason.
|
| If the US wants some content gone from the internet, they
| (usually) have enough might to make that happen.
|
| Most major tech companies are registered in the US, and can be
| ordered by a US court to stop providing services to pirates.
| This notably includes most major DNS registrars, reputable ad
| networks and major payment processors.
|
| There's no point in blocking a website if you can just boot it
| off Visa, or force it to show penis enlargement / shady
| gambling ads or malware popups to survive.
|
| Even if a website miraculously has no US links to exploit,
| there are extradition treaties, good relations with foreign law
| enforcement, control over the financial system, or even
| international sanctions if the situation gets dire enough.
|
| European countries are far less powerful here, especially when
| they act alone (as they usually do in these matters) instead of
| doing it under the auspices of the EU. Site blocking is often
| the only remedy they have.
|
| The US has an opposite problem with scam calls. Because there
| are so many English speakers in India, and Indian law
| enforcement largely doesn't care about scammers as long as they
| scam foreigners, there's little the US can do about the issue.
| European countries whose first language is not English have it
| much easier, as there's often no third-world country that
| speaks the same language and where the scammers could be
| recruited from.
| yimby2001 wrote:
| What piracy has the US government ever stopped? The pirate
| bay is up all the free movie tv.com sites are up
| ur-whale wrote:
| If there is ONE thing that needs to be decentralized RTFN, it is
| DNS.
|
| It's taking time, but the thugs in charge in various countries
| are slowly coming to realize that the easiest place to apply
| censorship is DNS because of its antiquated design and
| pervasiveness.
|
| One: you should be able to freely choose or name-to-IP-
| translation provider.
|
| Two: modern DNS should run on top of a trustless blockchain
| infrastructure.
|
| Namecoin was a very nice initial attempt, it's really sad it
| never took off.
|
| [EDIT]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin
| xvector wrote:
| Why is Europe like this? I feel like this is what happens when
| you have a region that can't innovate and only knows how to
| regulate.
|
| Innovators cease to be represented at the government level and
| the general public equates regulation with safety. The result is
| an increasing amount of absurd policymaking related to
| technology.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >Why is Europe like this?
|
| Italy isn't Europe. Europe isn't Italy, either.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-22 23:01 UTC)