[HN Gopher] Cloudflare Tells U.S. Govt That Foreign Site Blockin...
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Cloudflare Tells U.S. Govt That Foreign Site Blocking Efforts Are
Trade Barriers
Author : iamnothere
Score : 275 points
Date : 2025-11-06 13:41 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
| giorgioz wrote:
| I hosted a website on Cloudflare and I sent a link to it to a
| friend on a Sunday. The friend told me the website was down.
| Turns out Spain blocks IP addresses belonging to Cloudflare
| during big football matches because some pirate streaming
| websites are hosted on Cloudflare.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1nm80wz/trying_to_u...
|
| I decided to go back to AWS.
|
| Frankly Cloudflare is choosing the wrong battle on defending
| pirate streaming websites. There are other gray areas that I
| apprecciate Cloudflare defending freedom of speech online, but
| pirate streaming websites aren't one of those.
| hypeatei wrote:
| That's Spains issue. Spaniards should encourage their
| government to eliminate whatever nonsensical provision in the
| law that allows ranges of IPs to be blocked at the service
| provider level for soccer matches.
| benatkin wrote:
| It can be thought of in reverse, that they are letting the
| traffic in when there isn't a soccer match, so as to let the
| public temporarily use things that might eventually be fully
| blocked, and thus be able to conduct business on non-
| compliant sites.
| miohtama wrote:
| Also people in Spain are learning to use VPNs.
| ronsor wrote:
| Regardless of my opinion of soccer pirates, I still hate
| copyright clowns more.
| freedomben wrote:
| Cloudflare isn't defending the pirate streaming sites, they are
| simply living their principles of being neutral.
| ivl wrote:
| I don't even think that case was from Cloudflare hosting, just
| providing DDOS protection.
|
| And it wasn't a Spanish government policy, but rather a single
| judge's order.
| bell-cot wrote:
| "Major consequences M, because of an order by judge J" is not
| a situation which lasts...unless the government is relatively
| happy with M.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| This is like suggesting the policy of the United States is
| set by "just a panel of less than 10 judges" and not the
| Federal government. Not only is SCOTUS part of the US
| government, it may actually be the most powerful part of the
| Federal government
| benatkin wrote:
| Via a proxy? Or some other kind of DDOS protection? If it's a
| proxy, that should be considered hosting.
|
| Cloudflare does provide APIs to look up security threats by
| IP addresses that could help with DDOS, and I wouldn't
| consider that hosting: https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/
| resources/intel/subres...
| em-bee wrote:
| judges are giving orders based on the law/policy of the
| country. so if a judge gives a bad order, then the cause is a
| bad policy/law, and the fix is not to replace the judge, but
| to change the law.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| At first they came for the 4k bluray rips
| blitzar wrote:
| Then they came for the Linux ISOs
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I'm still kinda confused as to how this works. Doesn't every
| cloud connected or IoT device just die during a football game
| in Spain?
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Yes. And, who cares really? Maybe the users do, but the
| Spanish government certainly doesn't!
|
| How cheap, I wonder, does a government have to be to sell
| itself out over ball game broadcasting rights? Could someone
| like Elon Musk just fly in there and acquire the entire
| government with some pocket change?
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| OK - well thanks for explaining that. Maybe this will
| motivate digital sovereignty at a personal level?
| immibis wrote:
| It's literally the mafia. Not metaphorically - I'm told the
| _actual_ mafia basically owns football in Spain and Italy,
| which is why the government doesn 't do anything about this
| stupidity.
| lioeters wrote:
| As much as I'm skeptical of Cloudflare's dominant role, the
| problem here is not with Cloudflare but the politicians in
| Spain catering to LaLiga the football league. They're
| disrupting their country's public web infrastructure in favor
| of private money interests.
| digitalsushi wrote:
| i havent been in a tier 1 ISP in 20 years. can anyone who is in
| that life give a little summary of how much infrastructure we
| have in the united states to implement the same level of control
| as what china has available for walling its garden?
|
| like, if the direction came down from on high, to copy it ... how
| few things would have to get flipped on to have roughly the same
| thing in the united states?
|
| i'd really appreciate an insider's summary. a lot has changed
| since 2004. probably.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > how few things would have to get flipped on to have roughly
| the same thing in the united states?
|
| I'd argue it's already been flipped on. Our system just works a
| little bit differently. Nothing is strictly prohibited via some
| grand theatrical firewall. Things that are "undesirable" simply
| meet an information theoretical death sooner than they
| otherwise should. We've got mountains of tools like DMCA that
| can precision strike anything naughty while still preserving an
| illusion of freedom.
|
| Data hoarders are the American version of climbing over the
| GFW. The strategy of relying on entropy to kill off bad
| narratives seems to be quite effective. Social media platforms,
| cloud storage, et. al., are dramatically accelerating this
| pressure.
| HeinzStuckeIt wrote:
| > I'd argue it's already been flipped on.
|
| The Great Firewall is, among various other things, an attempt
| to create a single historical narrative for the PRC by
| blocking out reference to things like Tiananmen, discussions
| of early twentieth-century China suggesting that China could
| have gone a different way than the Communist Party and
| prospered, etc. The USA has absolutely nothing like that,
| people can readily find open-web and social-media content
| taking every possible position on American history, both
| staid academic content and wacko conspiracy theory stuff.
|
| When it all comes down to it, the USA just isn't as hung up
| on social harmony and narrative control as the PRC. That's
| why there isn't a comparable system in place, and claiming
| that the odious DMCA is anywhere close, is hyperbole.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| This is changing, because the ruling class of politicians
| and billionaires is discovering that things can actually
| change if they don't control the narrative, especially in
| the age of social media.
|
| Read up on the motivations behind the TikTok acquisition,
| or the attempts to legislatively censor certain topics on
| Wikipedia, or the myriad of knobs used by social media
| "content review" teams etc, or Chat Control in the EU, or
| going back further, the surveillance systems detailed in
| the Snowden leaks (why surveil if censorship isn't the
| goal?).
|
| It's ultimately exactly the same reasoning as that used by
| the CCP, but in a more subtle and gradual manner. Yes,
| right now, the GFW is a different beast, but if we do
| nothing, I would wager that the solutions will converge.
| encom wrote:
| It's not totally comparable, but if you went against the
| approved covid narrative a few years ago, you would
| absolutely get shut down by the big players for
| "misinformation". Same with the 2020 US election results.
| And in many cases they acted on behalf of the goverment:
|
| https://time.com/7015026/meta-facebook-zuckerberg-covid-
| bide...
|
| Misinformation or not, I like form my opinions myself,
| rather than have the government do it for me. There was
| absolutely a lot of nonsense[1] going around during covid,
| but constantly being told what to believe felt extremely
| irksome.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/sSkFyNVtNh8
| asdff wrote:
| This discounts the effects of things like shills
| (commercial or government) or propaganda in general and its
| quieting effect on discussion. Yes, there are conspiracy
| theories, but there is a reason why they end up relegated
| to the quacks and aren't broached upon at all, save for in
| jest perhaps, by mainstream sources of information. I mean
| really consider the actual diversity of thought among
| mainstream sources in this country. It is astoundingly
| limited and entirely biased towards neoliberalism. Our
| political spectrum is extremely narrow and differentiated
| by only a small handful of hobby horse issues.
| antonvs wrote:
| > Things that are "undesirable" simply meet an information
| theoretical death sooner than they otherwise should.
|
| A good example is how payment processors (mainly the major
| credit card companies) police adult sites, forcing them to
| ban certain keywords. It's a weird situation in which the
| role of morality police is played at the point where control
| can naturally be exercised in a capitalist economy.
|
| As we'd expect, that same pattern is repeated elsewhere, e.g.
| in social networks that censor in all sorts of ways, many of
| them explicitly intended to reinforce the status quo and
| neutralize or undermine dissent.
|
| When you have an authoritarian government, all of this tends
| to happen more centrally. But democracies tend to distribute
| this function throughout the economy and society.
| blahgeek wrote:
| There are actually two part of mechanisms in China to wall its
| garden.
|
| The first part is GFW, with which people outside of China is
| more familiar. It operates at every international internet
| cable, analyzing and dynamically blocks traffic in realtime.
| China only have few sites that connects to international
| internet, with very limited bandwidth (few Tbps in total), so
| it's more feasible. But overall speaking, this is the easy
| part.
|
| The second part of walling a garden is about controlling what's
| inside the garden. Every website running in China mainland
| needs an ICP license from the government, which can take weeks.
| ISPs must be state-owned (there are 4 of them in total, no
| local small ISPs whatsoever). Residential IPs cannot be used
| for serving websites because the inbound traffic of well-known
| ports are blocked, which is required by the law. VPN apps are
| illegal. etc. These are things that are much harder to do in
| other countries.
| beardyw wrote:
| "Trade barriers" - mmm, I wonder who's attention they are trying
| to get.
| stego-tech wrote:
| On the one hand, Cloudflare crying crocodile tears for their
| policy decisions isn't remotely moving. If anything, their plea
| for US intervention feels _incredibly_ insincere given that their
| business has been to defend literal Nazis and Pirates alike for
| decades, and if you're going to build a business out of defending
| bad actors, well, you best be prepared for the consequences.
|
| _That being said_ , they're absolutely right that these broad,
| automated blocks aren't acceptable for the internet as a whole -
| especially when a ruling is applicable regionally or globally.
| Blocking an entire IP range or service provider because of a
| handful of bad actors on their service is _incredibly_ excessive,
| akin to barricading off an entire neighborhood because one
| apartment is a crack den, i.e. stupidly disproportionate. If
| countries are having an issue with a company routinely and
| willfully allowing bad actors to prosper, the solution is simply
| to bar that company from operating within their jurisdiction
| commercially.
|
| Yet the IT dinosaur in me reads that statement above, and I
| ultimately find myself back at where I've been for years: for a
| globally distributed network, the only way to effectively punish
| an operator like Cloudflare is to block its entire IP range,
| despite the harms innocent customers and users will incur. And I
| can't quite figure out a way past that under the current
| piecemeal system of the internet and the financial incentives for
| consolidation and centralization.
|
| We have to punish bad actors, but when said actor commands a
| significant swath of the legitimate internet, you either have to
| harm a disproportionate amount of legitimate traffic in blocking
| them, or admit they're too big and important for a government to
| intervene against. The former is bad, but the latter is
| infinitely worse.
| wbl wrote:
| The courts can absolutely get Cloudflare to comply with orders.
| The only reason this doesn't happen is that the people asking
| for the blocking come with a list of IPs.
| stego-tech wrote:
| You're eSplaining my own argument back to me. Cloudflare's
| whinging is they shouldn't be required to block entire swaths
| of IP ranges because they have legitimate customer traffic
| there; their opponents (rightly) state that because of how
| Cloudflare and the internet works, the only real way to stop
| these piracy streams are wholesale service blocks, because of
| how easily specific IP or domain blocks can be bypassed.
|
| The centralization of power is the problem, and as I say near
| the end:
|
| > ...I can't quite figure out a way past that under the
| current piecemeal system of the internet and the financial
| incentives for consolidation and centralization.
| wbl wrote:
| Cloudflare could be told to kick the streams off and they
| would stop
| mikkupikku wrote:
| "Defend literal pirates" - imagine if it was the opposite; if
| the only way to keep a site on the internet without being
| ddosed into oblivion was to use Cloudflare but also they only
| permit sites which are approved of by corporate interests. That
| would be very dystopian.
|
| The root problem of course is their de facto monopoly status,
| as gatekeepers of the internet (if they aren't secretly an NSA
| run company, the NSA is probably _very_ jealous of what they
| 've done), but this would be _so much worse_ if they decided to
| play internet editor.
| stego-tech wrote:
| ...I find it interesting that you edited the quote to remove
| their defense of Nazis. Like, that's just a _very_ odd
| decision to make when quoting somebody.
|
| And you're covering the ground I already laid in the original
| comment:
|
| > ...the only way to effectively punish an operator like
| Cloudflare is to block its entire IP range, despite the harms
| innocent customers and users will incur. And I can't quite
| figure out a way past that under the current piecemeal system
| of the internet and the financial incentives for
| consolidation and centralization.
|
| I don't need eSplaining of my own argument.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| Taylor Swift is now on so...
| mikkupikku wrote:
| If you can't defend the premise of knocking Anna's Archive
| off the internet without hiding behind the tarpit of
| demanding the conversation be about Nazis, that is
| _extremely_ telling.
| wbl wrote:
| Akamai, CloudFront, whatever Googles service is, a bunch of
| other ones I can't think of compete in the same market.
| Cloudflare obviously is good at what they do but there
| decently are many fine CDN/DDOs prevention companies.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| If we are considering the social implications of Cloudflare
| being pressured to deplatform anybody who disrespects
| intellectual property, then why should we simultaneously
| assume that the other handful of companies offering a
| comparable service wouldn't be similarly pressured?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Cloudflare does not have a monopoly on internet hosting, or
| even just web application firewalls or DDoS protection. The
| only thing different about them is that:
|
| 1. They have a moderately generous free tier, which they'll
| aggressively try to upsell you out of the moment they smell
| money in your wallet.
|
| 2. They have an anti-censorship policy that is
| indistinguishable from the policies of a "bulletproof"
| hosting company, which means all the DDoS vendors they
| protect you from are also paying Cloudflare.
|
| This leads me to believe that Cloudflare's protection is less
| "stringent defense of free speech" and more "you wouldn't
| want something to happen to that precious website of yours,
| right?" Like, there's no free speech argument for keeping
| DDoS vendors online - it's a patently obvious own goal. If
| someone is selling censorship as a service, then it's
| obvious, at least to me, that silencing them and them alone
| would actually make others more free to speak.
| immibis wrote:
| I knew about the Nazis, but I wasn't aware Cloudflare defended
| literal sea pirates? When did that happen? I guess the US Navy?
| sammy2255 wrote:
| They don't. And actually, quite hilariously, Somalian pirates
| raided the Kenyan data center that Cloudflare have their
| Kenyan PoP in (7 years ago). https://old.reddit.com/r/CloudFl
| are/comments/837c4c/somalian...
| stego-tech wrote:
| I had missed this and find it deeply hilarious that actual
| meatspace pirates raided a company's datacenter that
| protects digital pirates.
|
| Also, just for folks seemingly confused by my words in the
| original post: I got no beef with digital piracy myself,
| just more pointing out that if your company is willfully
| protecting hate speech (like Nazis) and piracy sites, well,
| you're courting a _very specific kind of response_ , and
| whining about receiving that response after the fact is not
| exactly sympathetic.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Folks keep confusing where I used the term "literal" in that
| sentence. I said "literal Nazis _and_ pirates", not Nazis and
| literal pirates.
|
| It's why I staunchly refuse to touch Cloudflare for fucking
| anything. When your company defends a group whose ethos is
| genocide, you've lost me forever, free speech be damned.
| ivl wrote:
| Cloudflare is right. But, it's a pretty typical EU play.
| Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.
|
| In this case, hitting a massive number of small sites, which
| aren't engaged in piracy, to protect a few large entities from
| some other small piracy sites. It's what's happening in both
| Italy and Spain.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > But, it's a pretty typical EU play. Protecting more
| established interests but kneecapping progress.
|
| It's funny that as soon as anything European (not even related
| to EU one bit) is mentioned, people find a way of pinning it on
| the European Union. The article has literally nothing to do
| with EU, and everything to do with individual European
| countries, yet you somehow found a way of blaming EU for it :)
|
| Sincerely, Spanish internet user who gets blocked from half the
| internet every time a semi-popular football match is played in
| this country.
| antonvs wrote:
| > It's funny that as soon as anything European (not even
| related to EU one bit)
|
| Living in the US, I've noticed many Americans don't really
| make distinctions like that. They see "EU" as a kind of
| shorthand for "Europe", or something along those lines. Even
| the fact that the UK is no longer in the EU doesn't affect
| this - it's still part of what Americans _think of_ as "the
| EU".
| R_D_Olivaw wrote:
| Hell, watch an American's face when you explain to them
| that "America" doesn't ONLY refer to the united states.
|
| See the gears grind to a halt when they are reeducated on
| the concepts of "Central AMERICA" and "South AMERICA".
| nicole_express wrote:
| In the United States, "North America" and "South America"
| are generally treated as separate continents, so
| therefore as a whole are called "the Americas". This
| frees up the singular "America" to refer to the US
| without too much risk of ambiguity. My understanding is
| that in some places, especially non-English speaking, is
| that North and South America are treated as a single
| continent called "America", which adds ambiguity.
|
| People often get confused by divisions like this because
| they feel like they should be real in an objective sense,
| but continents are almost entirely social constructs.
| (There is a North American tectonic plate, and that's
| real, but it doesn't quite line up with the continent)
| rob74 wrote:
| Be that as it may, the thing that sounds odd (and a bit
| arrogant) to most "outsiders" is using the name of a
| whole continent for a single country and its citizens. I
| (from Europe) would definitely consider a Canadian,
| Mexican or Columbian citizen as an "American" too, not
| only a citizen of the United States. BTW, I'm really
| curious what Trump thinks the "America" in his "Gulf of
| America" stands for - the whole continent or only the US?
| nicole_express wrote:
| Trump's definitely referring to the United States with
| his pointless renaming attempt because it's singular and
| not plural, but I'd be careful accusing him of _thinking_
| about anything. I doubt he does that very often.
|
| I guess the Organization of American States exists. But
| usually it's pretty unambiguous which sense is being
| used; like, I guess you _could_ call Mark Carney an
| American head of government but it 's basically just
| being obtuse, unless it was in the context of, say, a
| meeting of Carney with other heads of government in the
| hemisphere, and then it'd be unambiguous what was meant.
|
| Even "United States of America" is not unambiguous in the
| most pathological case; Mexico is also a country
| consisting of united states existing in the Americas.
| epolanski wrote:
| Okay, maybe arrogant, but still, it's the only country in
| the continent to contain the word America, no?
| ineedasername wrote:
| That would be the same grind to a halt you'd get on just
| about anyone's face when they have a random stranger try
| to explain something obvious in a rude and condescending
| way. The inside voice goes something like: "Do I walk by,
| is this person sane, or maybe say something equally
| condescending like 'Hey buddy, with the bombs we have it
| will be called whatever we want.'"
| smolder wrote:
| US education covers that much pretty well. Just not so
| much the geography of specific countries that belong to
| south america, europe, asia, and africa.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Probably because most adults in the US grew up and were
| educated at a time when the EU was, comparative to today,
| insignificant in # of countries, population, GDP, and
| general importance, and so very little talked about in
| either news or text books _compared to Europe_ as an
| economic and political block. And since Europe was
| abbreviated 'Eur' well, easy to see how dropping the 'r'
| hasn't resulted in universal US intuition that it's not the
| same thing. In general though it does seem pretty
| understandable to think something calling itself "The
| European Union" is comprised of just about all of Europe.
| Especially back with the expanded in '93 countries it was a
| little presumptuous at only a small fraction of the
| continent getting together and calling itself that? I do
| remember learning something about it in school at the time,
| under the EEC name.
|
| Want to avoid confusion? Call it something like "United
| Nations", 'UN'. Confusion solved, Americans happy, call off
| the tariffs, peace, etc.
| Taek wrote:
| I was actually like 30 years old when I realized "EU" meant
| "European Union" and wasn't a 2 letter abbreviation for the
| continent of Europe. In the US, we call states by their two
| letter abbreviations (IL, NY, CA, etc), often call countries
| by 2 letter abbreviations too (depends on the country, but
| JP, AR, CR come to mind as common examples), so it's a pretty
| natural assumption to think of 'EU' as 'all of the continent
| Europe, independent of whether they participate in the
| governing body known as the European Union'
|
| If you substitute the GP for 'pretty typical European play'
| it makes plenty of sense.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yeah, similarly, growing up as a European, I thought
| "America" was "the USA", but turns out it's the entire
| continent, and even "North America" isn't just the US, but
| the two neighbors too! I don't think it's too bad to be
| confused about something, we can't be expected to know it
| all, every time. We learn and move past it :)
|
| > If you substitute the GP for 'pretty typical European
| play' it makes plenty of sense.
|
| Not sure even this makes sense, it's not something that is
| happening Europe wide, and it seems like there is only two
| countries so far that been engaging in this, with another
| one thinking about it. For something to be a "pretty
| typical European play" I'd probably say it has to have
| happened more times than "twice".
| microtonal wrote:
| _But, it 's a pretty typical EU play. Protecting more
| established interests but kneecapping progress._
|
| You mean like that nasty EU law called the DMCA?
|
| </s> (just in case)
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Does not have anything to do with EU. But nice try.
| troupo wrote:
| > But, it's a pretty typical EU play. Protecting more
| established interests but kneecapping progress.
|
| EU is literally about removing protections for established
| interests: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-
| in-the-e...
| quentindanjou wrote:
| > Protecting more established interests but kneecapping
| progress.
|
| I assume you must be American. I always find it funny that
| there is that US belief that Europe is "old-fashioned" with
| "old tech" and "old progress". I never encountered anyone yet
| to tell me what _progress_ wasn 't in Europe that was in the
| US.
|
| I actually think this is a bit backward, with US lack of
| transportation funding, more people struggling with poverty,
| backward ecological measures, and missing health care with
| lower life expectancy.
| epolanski wrote:
| I'm European too, while I second what you say, I also think
| that Europe is old: demographically, politically and we're
| very risk adverse.
| tiahura wrote:
| Backbone operators in the US should not be allowed to connect to
| networks that connect to low trust countries.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I've often wondered if that is even possible (whether it is
| good policy or not is another question entirely). Could we
| disconnect Russia from the Internet effectively? Let's say that
| Europe could be pressured to cooperate, what then? Well, here a
| couple of years ago I finally got the answer I wanted: we
| can't. China would never abide any such sanction, and there
| must be a few overland backbones connecting the two (even if
| I'm wrong here, wouldn't take decades for those to be built).
|
| Likely, the country that wanted to do this finds themselves
| isolated on their own network, not their target isolated from
| the internet. Even if that country as is large and powerful as
| the United States. Perhaps the answer might have been
| different, 20 years ago or even 15, but everything has changed
| and there's no going back.
| tiahura wrote:
| It would be easy. Require the backbone CEO's to certify that
| their networks don't connect to networks that connect to
| China, Russia, Nigeria, etc. The burden would then shift to
| them. If they couldn't get a guarantee from a peer or
| customer, they would have to disconnect them.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >It would be easy. Require the backbone CEO's to certify
| that their networks don't connect to networks that connect
| to China, Russia, Nigeria, etc.
|
| And when other countries don't play ball? Then we shut down
| those backbones, and it's the United States that is
| isolate, not Russia (though please feel free to pick
| another target if you don't like Russia). No one's cutting
| off China, not without their economy dropping dead. Sure,
| maybe there's some country that you could do this to... but
| that country is so unimportant that they're probably
| already almost-cut-off anyway. You don't even get to to do
| this to a Brazil or Indonesia, let alone any country that
| matters.
| cpursley wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. They were cut off from SWIFT and yet they
| do ample international trade. These think tank ideas from
| "domain experts" and political types rarely work in the
| real world. Russia, China and others do the same, block
| stuff - but people get the content, products, etc
| anyways.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| Nigeria really?
|
| Don't use that brain to cross the road
| iamnothere wrote:
| Exactly, this would just result in a global game of whack-a-
| mole. It is possible in autocracies that are mostly excluded
| from global trade, like North Korea, but China for example
| can't afford to cut itself off without collapsing its
| economy. (It has the Great Firewall, but that does not block
| entire countries, and is often quite leaky.)
| deeth_starr_v wrote:
| I doubt this would be legal unless proven to be a national
| security issue (1st amendment grounds).
| mminer237 wrote:
| The First Amendment doesn't apply to non-citizens in foreign
| countries.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| This boneheaded idea of "just block the Bad Countries from our
| Good Web" needs to die a miserable death.
|
| Countries like Russia or China spend billions on controlling
| the flow of information on their own land. Countries like Iran
| go out of their way to blackhole the traffic whenever any
| disruptions or political violence happens in the country, and
| for every Nepal, where this backfired terribly, there's a dozen
| cases of countries doing that and getting away with it. And
| you're proposing we just help the authoritarians out by doing
| their dirty work for them.
|
| Sure, let's do that! Give their propagandists a win, leave
| everyone who's in those countries now hang out to dry in an
| information black hole! Let the abuses perpetuated by their own
| governments go unseen and unheard! All to preserve the Good
| Web, For Good People Only.
| radiator wrote:
| I find the notion that propagandists only control the flow of
| information in countries like Russia, China, Iran - but they
| don't in the West - misguided at best.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| I think that is the point.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Wow, coming on to HN to demand the end of the Internet.
| moralestapia wrote:
| That's true.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| I'm no fan of Cloudflare, but they're completely in the right on
| that. Infrastructure for blocking websites simply shouldn't
| exist.
|
| Because if it's allowed to exist, it ends up subsumed by
| political and corporate interests, and becomes a tool of
| overreach and abuse. We've seen that happen over and over again.
|
| If US Trade Office can be leveraged to destroy internet
| censorship efforts in other countries, then so be it.
| pyrale wrote:
| > If US Trade Office can be leveraged to destroy internet
| censorship efforts in other countries, then so be it.
|
| ...But, of course, US corporations enforcing the same kind of
| censoring is a-OK, because corporations are people and their
| censorship is free speech.
|
| I'll be open to your posititon the day Boticelli's Venus
| doesn't get censored on FB because there's a pair of tits
| somewhere on the painting.
| RobKohr wrote:
| Facebook is a single website. Other websites can host it just
| fine.
|
| This is the same as blocking content on your own forum or
| comment section on your blog. Yes fb is huge, but still just
| a website, and one with fading popularity.
|
| Blocking ips on a network level is different.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| Facebook isn't just a website. Like whatsapp isn't just a
| messaging app and visa/mastercard aren't just some of the
| credit card companies.
| grayhatter wrote:
| I see the comparison you're trying to draw, and I don't
| agree.
|
| People use FB because other people use it. There's a lot
| more complexity, and algorithm fuled habits. But in the
| end, FB provides the service of communication and content
| recommendations. Using that attention, it can sell ads.
| Without that willingness to give attention, they can't
| sell ads. There are no significant hurdles to starting a
| social media site.
|
| Credit card processors facilitate payments from one group
| to a different group. They aren't an endpoint, they are
| middle men. They don't need to court the attention of
| users, they are in a position of power it where they can
| interfere with the lives of others, and have formed a
| coalition with a total monopoly over the digital trade of
| money. Good luck starting a competitor while attempting
| to shun PCI compliance.
|
| If I never use FB, I can still interact with friends,
| family, buy and sell ads. If I never use a credit card...
| I've been cut off from the vast majority of the things
| that I would buy.
|
| It's reasonable for different rules to apply to groups
| with vastly different powers. I wouldn't expect Google to
| be held to the same standard that I hold PG&E. Nor would
| I hold PG&E to the same restrictions I'd place on Google.
| robocat wrote:
| > fading popularity
|
| You made that up, or you checked stats?
|
| A quick Google says that Facebook is still growing at about
| 5% and that Meta revenue is up a lot.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Facebook MAU is down from 3.65 B to 3.06 B in the last
| year
| iamnothere wrote:
| Whataboutism. I am no fan of CF or current US trade policy,
| but I'll take whatever wins we can get when it comes to
| internet freedom.
| pyrale wrote:
| There is no win in using this administration to strong-arm
| other countries into giving tech corps some sort of
| extraterritoriality.
|
| Yes, Spain is screwing up. But it is the responsibility of
| Spanish electors to fix the mess. Any alternative involving
| the US department of State should be fought.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Not to mention that several US states have various sorts of
| adult content bans.
| em-bee wrote:
| it's not so much the US Trade Office, but this needs to be
| considered in any international trade agreements.
|
| blocking that interferes with access to legitimate sites that i
| might use to buy or sell products and communicate with
| potential customers should be a violation of these agreements.
| cowboy_henk wrote:
| That's a bit rich coming from Cloudflare, a company that
| routinely blocks access to important and legitimate websites to
| huge parts of the world. A huge part of Cloudflare's customers
| use them specifically to block users' access to websites.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Gotta take your wins when you can get them.
| rsingel wrote:
| There's a big difference between a company making that
| decision (an edge provider) vs a country doing that at the
| network level.
|
| The rub comes in that nations, including the U.S., have laws
| about what they seem illegal content or services and reserve
| the right to force those to be blocked.
|
| In Thailand that might be criticism of the king; in the U.S.,
| pirated TV streams; in another country, that could be
| gambling sites.
|
| Cloudflare seems to be trying to stop blocking that is trade
| protectionism, but is blocking overseas gambling sites trade
| protection or a legit state interest in protecting its
| citizens?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Why is there a "big difference"?
|
| Cloudflare has a significant enough marketshare it doesn't
| seem to make a meaningful difference whether it's blocked
| at this or that level, for the vast majority of end users.
| Moto7451 wrote:
| As someone who has had to implement these blocks, it's not
| generally done because anyone wants to, it's because someone
| passed a law that requires us to do it. I don't get to
| override the ITAR or Entities list just because I don't feel
| it's fair someone is on it.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| > Infrastructure for blocking websites simply shouldn't exist.
|
| Isn't that exactly what Cloudflare is, in part? They happily
| block "malicious" traffic
| nozzlegear wrote:
| They block traffic reaching your website, not the other way
| around. For a poor, nitpickable analogy: they keep the bad
| guys out of your home, but they don't want to take away homes
| from the bad guys.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| We all know the definition of "bad guy" shifts every four
| years or less
|
| I get what you're saying (they're affording access to info,
| not access for people) but you can't have one without the
| other.
| immibis wrote:
| With your analogy, they aim to keep the "bad guys" out of
| _all_ homes, which is the same thing as saying those guys
| can 't have homes. Also the "bad guys" group you're
| referring to includes, like, my cousin Jake because he
| accidentally crashed his pushbike into a car once when he
| was 6, but doesn't include Adolf Hitler for some reason.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Part of the reason I don't like Cloudflare. Their "black hole
| the entire country" function is a function no company should
| provide.
| yachad wrote:
| On the contrary, if you don't have business in a country
| and they just spam you or try to hack you why not block the
| whole IP range. China, India, Russia, Subsaharan Africa,
| SEA
| prmoustache wrote:
| you don't need cloudflare for that.
| em-bee wrote:
| so as a traveler, i can't access important sites in my
| home country because i happen to be in a different
| country that you decided to block?
| duxup wrote:
| Companies should have that option if they choose, to apply
| to themselves at will.
| remarkEon wrote:
| Why not? There's no right to force everyone on the internet
| to interact with everyone else.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Their "black hole the entire country" function is a
| function no company should provide._
|
| If I can have that feature with an on-prem firewall or load
| balancer, why can't I ask the in-cloud equivalent to also
| have it?
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Infrastructure for blocking websites simply shouldn't exist.
|
| I think people have forgotten how extreme a position this is:
| the idea that once something is on the internet, national law
| simply ceases to apply and governments should have absolutely
| zero control over obscene material, IP infringment, harassment,
| libel, foreign propaganda, money laundering, fraudulent
| financial services, gambling, and so on - simply because it's
| hosted in a different country.
|
| Not even the US really believes that domestically .. or even
| when it comes to overseas enforcement, such as sending the FBI
| to New Zealand to get Kim Dotcom. Or the Pokerstars case.
|
| Not to mention I am _really_ skeptical of the magic invocation
| of "trade" to overrule national sovereignty. That leads you to
| stupid places such as Philip Morris trying to use the ISDS
| process to force Australia to accept an inherently poisonous
| product (fortunately they eventually lost).
| https://www.linklaters.com/insights/blogs/arbitrationlinks/2...
| immibis wrote:
| Nobody's saying the government shouldn't be able to go after
| the owner of the site and force them to shut it down. It
| definitely shouldn't be done by third parties though.
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| How does the US government, force a Russian website, hosted
| in Russia, for Russian people, following Russian laws, to
| shut down?
| malfist wrote:
| It doesn't.
| hereme888 wrote:
| Dove a bit into this topic superficially out of
| curiosity. Maybe not shut it down but greatly limit
| reach:
|
| - Domain Name Seizures via ICANN and registrars
|
| - Political/legal pressure on CDNs, SSL certificate
| providers, bandwidth providers.
|
| - Propaganda and legal labeling ("malicious actor",
| "foreign agent", "terrorist")
|
| - There are technical workarounds to keep the page up
| within Russia's sovereign internet (Runet).
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| Other than labeling, aren't these just different ways to
| block foreign sites? Some of them are mentioned in the
| article.
|
| > This blocking regulation requires network providers,
| including CDNs, to comply with blocking notices within 30
| minutes.
|
| > orders that go beyond regular Internet providers,
| requiring DNS resolvers and VPN services to take action
| as well.
| immibis wrote:
| Same thing they do to every country, Pinky. Have a small
| team invade the country and disappear the people they
| don't like[1].
|
| Or tap the fiber lines at the border and inject RST
| packets from off-path, which is something the Great
| Firewall of China does, and is ironically much more
| transparent than what they actually are doing.
|
| Or cut the cables between the USA and Russia, or between
| the USA and any country that doesn't cut their own cables
| to Russia. The USA did this to Iran with the banking
| system and it worked: the USA cuts money transfers with
| any country that doesn't cut money transfers with Iran. I
| don't think it would necessarily go their way if they did
| it right now with the internet.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Omar_case
| skeledrew wrote:
| And 3rd parrot parties with enough power, the ones doing
| the abuse, typically also have the ear of the government,
| so it becomes circular.
| loeg wrote:
| The US already deputizes third parties to enforce its laws.
| Banks are responsible for KYC / AML. Grocery stores must
| check ID when selling alcohol. This is nothing special.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| I wouldn't call legal force to be deputizing anybody. If
| those entities don't do as the law says they will be in
| trouble themselves. Deputies have authority. Banks and
| stores are just following the rules and report to
| authority when required.
| loeg wrote:
| You're picking a pretty fine semantic distinction, and
| IMO if you're going to be a pedant, you should try to be
| correct. Deputization isn't my invented description for
| this model; it's more broadly used. E.g.,
| https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/money-laundering-
| and-...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It's accurate that the US already does it, but that
| doesn't tell you if we should be doing it.
|
| It does, however, provide evidence that doing that is
| dumb.
|
| KYC/AML have an effectiveness that rounds to zero while
| causing trouble for innocent people as the government
| pressures the banks to do something about problems the
| banks aren't in a position to actually solve, so instead
| the banks suspend the accounts of more innocent people
| because the government is pressuring them to suspend more
| accounts.
| iamnothere wrote:
| > I think people have forgotten how extreme a position this
| is: the idea that once something is on the internet, national
| law simply ceases to apply and governments should have
| absolutely zero control over obscene material, IP
| infringment, harassment, libel, foreign propaganda, money
| laundering, fraudulent financial services, gambling, and so
| on - simply because it's hosted in a different country.
|
| This has more or less been the default position of most
| internet users and developers since the beginning, until
| fairly recently. I'd even contend that it's what drew many of
| us to the internet in the first place. If the internet ever
| becomes cable TV, fully regulated, controlled, and managed,
| it will have lost its purpose as a place for free and open
| exchange of information.
|
| (Zero control is an exaggeration--the worst lawbreakers still
| face justice under the current system, and that seems ok. I
| just don't think we should be tightening the screws any
| further.)
| remarkEon wrote:
| > Zero control is an exaggeration--the worst lawbreakers
| still face justice under the current system, and that seems
| ok.
|
| Doesn't scale.
| iamnothere wrote:
| Doesn't need to. The optimum amount of lawbreaking is
| non-zero. As long as we are catching the worst criminals
| and creating reasonable incentives to avoid crime, we are
| doing enough. Some amount of lawbreaking is to be
| expected in a free society; it's literally the price of
| freedom.
| recursive wrote:
| > The optimum amount of lawbreaking is non-zero
|
| This is a new idea for me. How is optimality measured
| here? Aggregate utility for society? What's the
| independent variable? Is this from the perspective of
| law-makers? If I was on a desert island, should I do some
| crime to ensure optimality?
| iamnothere wrote:
| This idea was explored recently here:
| https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-
| fra...
|
| This is just another form of Blackstone's ratio:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone's_ratio
|
| The problem itself is an ancient one and you can find a
| number of texts that explore the idea from various
| angles.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Well, yes. But then again, those beginners gave us
| unauthenticated TCP...
| themafia wrote:
| "Gave" is the key word. You got TCP for free. There were
| other competing network protocols. You might ask, why
| didn't those get used instead?
| pfortuny wrote:
| You are right, but I was referring to the fact that their
| ideas are not necessarily the best ones. Edit: because
| they were too optimistic, they left the security problems
| behind. Same with this kind of problem.
| iamnothere wrote:
| Authenticated TCP wouldn't have been feasible on early
| networks due to hardware limitations. But here in the
| present, you could certainly build it. As long as it
| works on top of IP, nothing is stopping you.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I think if something is hosted in a different country, the
| laws of that country apply to that service. It's not under
| your jurisdiction, so you have no say in whether it's allowed
| to exist, nor should you.
|
| You can, of course, pass a law making it illegal for your
| citizens to communicate with that service, but I think it's
| really important to understand that that's what's happening.
| You are passing a law which applies to your citizens and
| their right to communicate with people in other countries;
| it's their freedoms you are placing limits on, not the
| freedoms of the foreign website. Sometimes when you frame
| things that way, such restrictions stop making sense. (Though
| perhaps not always.)
| vkou wrote:
| You're missing one further step - you can also sanction a
| foreign business from doing business in your country. So,
| you can allow it to serve your citizens packets, but if you
| block it from collecting revenue, it will have little
| incentive to (unless it's a state-sponsored bad actor, then
| you can only lean on the two mechanisms you described).
|
| All three prongs (ban hosting, ban access, ban revenue) can
| be used to keep foreign interference out of your country.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| True, but I would still frame that as a restriction on
| your own citizen's freedom to buy services from foreign
| countries. Unless they're physically shipping stuff
| across your borders, a foreign website that accepts
| payment from your citizens isn't "doing business in your
| country" anymore than a hot dog vendor is by serving
| foreign tourists in my opinion.
| vkou wrote:
| > Unless they're physically shipping stuff across your
| borders, a foreign website that accepts payment from your
| citizens isn't "doing business in your country" anymore
| than a hot dog vendor is by serving foreign tourists in
| my opinion.
|
| We're in the electronic age, 'stuff' includes
| electricity, media, and remote-provided services. For a
| concrete example - if you're buying legal advice from a
| lawyer, it doesn't matter if he's down the street from
| you, or on another continent - the exchange of money for
| 'stuff' is the same.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > but if you block it from collecting revenue
|
| How is this not a trade barrier against foreign payment
| providers?
| vkou wrote:
| If it's nation-of-origin-agnostic (All vendors, domestic
| or foreign have to follow the same rules, and the
| foreigners have _chosen_ to not follow those rules, and
| are being sanctioned for it), it 's not a trade barrier.
|
| It's just a foreign company being upset that it isn't
| getting special treatment that would allow it to operate
| with an illegal advantage over local vendors.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| _Is_ that what it is though? It seems weird that such an
| overwhelming majority of US retail banking customers are
| using a domestic institution if the foreign ones are
| getting a fair shake, doesn 't it?
|
| Countries do a thing where they call something "neutral
| rules" while crafting them such that only the domestic
| incumbents can satisfy them or they can be selectively
| enforced against anyone the regulators don't like or who
| actually does or is deemed likely to refuse to comply
| with extralegal requests that the law doesn't or couldn't
| require. The US financial regulators do exactly that and
| you can see it in the outcomes.
| vkou wrote:
| > It seems weird that such an overwhelming majority of US
| retail banking customers are using a domestic institution
| if the foreign ones are getting a fair shake, doesn't it?
|
| Why is it weird? All other aspects being equal, why would
| _you_ want to put your money into a bank that 's
| accountable to another government first, and your market
| second?
|
| Banking involves a _ton_ of (unverifiable from the retail
| end) trust. There are a lot of risks to it. Going with a
| local institution mitigates some of them, and going with
| a foreign one adds very few benefits (Unless you 're
| doing a lot of business in their home country).
|
| You can absolutely bank with a foreign bank. HSBC is a
| giant international bank. TD and RBC are Canadian banks
| with branches in the US (RBC's are whitelabeled as City
| National Bank). If you want to do some tax evasion, or
| deal with the fallout of rogue traders, or bank with
| someone who has the rotting corpse of Credit Suisse
| anchored around its neck, you're free to do your retail
| (or investment) banking with UBS.
|
| _Why aren 't you using them?_
|
| I assure you, you'll find the experience largely
| interchangeable with the same level of service you'd
| expect from any of the Big Four.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Mmmmhhhhh... There is the problem of the middleman (the
| telcos): you are using them for communication.
|
| I guess if the USPS/Fedex knew for a fact (such as your
| website request) that you were communicating CP, the. they
| should do something about it?
|
| This is an honest question.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > I guess if the USPS/Fedex knew for a fact (such as your
| website request) that you were communicating CP, the.
| they should do something about it?
|
| That is often the case, but it's also not the relevant
| part, because consider what happens if you do that. I
| mean it's the same thing that happens with parcel
| carriers -- everybody's package ends up in an opaque
| brown box and the carrier has no means to determine if
| it's contraband. They just weigh it and deliver it, which
| is what they're supposed to do, because they're not the
| police.
|
| And so it is with ISPs. What happens if you make them
| block stuff people actually want? TLS, third party DNS,
| VPNs, etc.
|
| At that point you have to answer a different question:
| Should they be obligated to open and censor your mail?
|
| No. The answer is no.
| dingnuts wrote:
| > Should they be obligated to open and censor your mail?
|
| they are. they're not obligated to go through every
| package but they are absolutely obligated to turn over
| packages to law enforcement, and they do, and law
| enforcement will one hundred percent open and go through
| your mail. and if they find something you shouldn't have
| they will dress up as a mail carrier to deliver it to you
| and then detain you!
|
| I'm not sure what point you're trying to make exactly but
| this is a losing battle
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| If the government wants to read your mail, they need a
| warrant. And then it's the government doing it, not a
| private company, and you have a right to a trial and to
| see the evidence presented against you etc. etc., which
| is why it shouldn't be put on a private company who isn't
| going to do any of that.
| foxglacier wrote:
| "your citizens" includes your ISPs so you can forbid them
| from delivering that content to their customers in your
| country, which is just site blocking. The law could allow
| consumption of the material but not redistribution within
| your country so it's not the end user's responsibility but
| is the ISP's.
|
| What about name suppression for criminal cases? If somebody
| is charged with a crime but hasn't yet had their trial, or
| is the victim of a crime such as sexual abuse, some
| countries will allow judges to forbid publication of their
| name (in case they turn out to be innocent) so local media
| can't say who it is but foreign media does and local people
| all know who it is anyway, defeating the purpose of name
| suppression. Perhaps we shouldn't have name suppression?
| bloppe wrote:
| How is this different from the status quo?
| secretmark wrote:
| Techno-libertarianism is indeed the water we swim in. I
| enjoyed this academic-ish book on the topic that interrogates
| its positions. It shows how radical some of them are https://
| www.upress.umn.edu/9781517918149/cyberlibertarianism...
| PeaceTed wrote:
| It is a tough predicament we find our selves in. A totally
| free and open network is prone to exploitation by rampant
| abuse. A controlled and monitored network is prone to
| excessive restrictions.
|
| There is a middle way that can kind of muddle along but it
| can be attacked by both sides for being both to strict and
| not being strict enough.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > I think people have forgotten how extreme a position this
| is
|
| If you can _forget_ that a position is extreme, doesn 't that
| imply that it's a relatively unoffensive and reasonable
| position? For actual extreme positions like "reduce housing
| scarcity by murdering some category of people" or "mitigate
| climate change by prohibiting human reproduction", does
| anyone need to be reminded that they're extreme?
|
| > the idea that once something is on the internet, national
| law simply ceases to apply and governments should have
| absolutely zero control over obscene material, IP
| infringment, harassment, libel, foreign propaganda, money
| laundering, fraudulent financial services, gambling, and so
| on - simply because it's hosted in a different country.
|
| Is this any different than the premise of sovereignty to
| begin with?
|
| If you live somewhere gambling is illegal you can get on a
| flight to Las Vegas. If you want to buy a gun and go to the
| range to shoot it, or buy a piece of land where you can keep
| your gun, you can go to Texas, even though there are
| countries where guns and private land ownership by non-
| citizens are illegal. If you want to use certain drugs you
| can go to certain other countries.
|
| Isn't the extreme position that a country should be able to
| control what you do even when you're willingly choosing to do
| it in another jurisdiction? Do the people own the government
| or does the government own the people?
| asdff wrote:
| It is kind of stupid when you think about what this stuff
| fundamentally is: digital files on someone's computer that
| you connected to. The analog, well, analog would be if the
| FBI had cctv into everyone's bookshelf and desk drawer. Some
| real Orwellian thought policing we hand wave away because the
| nature of the technology makes such surveillance logistically
| trivial in comparison.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| so for example Germany should not be allowed to block neo-nazi
| sites?
|
| illegal gambling sites in country X must be allowed if they are
| legal in country Y - Y being America I guess.
|
| >it ends up subsumed by political and corporate interests I
| believe the term for this is legislated by the laws of
| particular lands and regions.
|
| Essentially Cloudflare tells U.S Government to set the rules
| for rest of world please.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| > illegal gambling sites in country X must be allowed if they
| are legal in country Y - _Y being America I guess._
|
| Other way around, actually
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigua#Online_gambling
| exasperaited wrote:
| > If US Trade Office can be leveraged to destroy internet
| censorship efforts in other countries, then so be it.
|
| So by implication you're actually completely fine with other
| countries pursuing their own objectives for businesses that
| choose to trade in their country.
|
| Because you cannot, possibly, in 2025, be making an argument
| that the USA's interpretation of the way of things is
| unimpeachable. That would be absurd and laughable.
|
| I look forward to you explaining to Germans and Israelis why
| Nazi symbols and Nazi websites should be legal because banning
| them hurts a US tech company's interests.
|
| I'm pretty sure you will receive a variety of opinions, some of
| them in large fonts with an invitation to print them and roll
| them up for storage.
| jalk wrote:
| You are missing the point. Blocking a CDN providers IP range,
| means blocking all the websites using the CDN - not just the
| nazi-poster.com.
| youngtaff wrote:
| Well then perhaps the CDN shouldn't be protecting those
| sites?
| jalk wrote:
| Different countries have different laws regarding what
| falls under freedom of speech. The CDN providers say they
| take a net-neutrality stance. If a court order from a
| specific country tells them to block certain sites, I'm
| pretty sure they will comply, but only for clients coming
| from within that country.
| exasperaited wrote:
| This is quite close to the whole Nazi bar analogy isn't it?
|
| You run a bar. You let anyone in, and some of your
| customers are a bit edgy.
|
| But one day, Nazis start using your bar for their regular
| gathering and you don't kick them out.
|
| Congratulations: now you have a Nazi bar.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| An obvious problem with this analogy is that the
| percentage of Cloudflare's traffic which could _be_ Nazis
| even if they were hosting all the Nazis in the world
| would still start with a 0 followed by a decimal point.
| exasperaited wrote:
| The analogy is not about Cloudflare but about the hosting
| provider Cloudflare is blocking.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| There is no threat of any particular service being
| overrun with any particular ideology. That isn't how this
| works. If the same host is hosting the websites of both
| Israeli and Muslim groups, neither of them would even be
| aware of the other being on the same servers unless
| somebody told them.
|
| Moreover, Cloudflare is the CDN _being_ blocked by
| foreign ISPs because their laws require ISPs to do
| blocking on the basis of IP address even though
| Cloudflare 's IP addresses are shared by huge numbers of
| other customers. It's effectively an attempt to punish
| international companies for having customers who do
| something which is illegal in one country even if it's
| legal in their own country, e.g. some content is in the
| public domain in one country but not another. It's an
| attempt to apply one country's laws to another country.
|
| Which _is_ a trade barrier because it prevents a company
| from serving the customers in both jurisdictions,
| creating a preference for domestic companies that don 't
| operate in the jurisdictions with less restrictive laws.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| And on the plus side, all those efforts to block AI-scraping
| bots will be deemed illegal trade barriers.
| nkrisc wrote:
| If content can be delivered over the internet, then content can
| also not be delivered over the internet. The only question is
| how surgical the ban hammer is.
|
| Some countries simply disconnect themselves from the global
| internet on occasion to prevent content from being delivered.
| BartjeD wrote:
| It is a trade barrier... For services. And that's the ciritical
| bit of information.
|
| Most international trade agreements don't cover services in in a
| comprehensive manner. Because they are so varied and difficult to
| regulate. E.g. banking, sales, advice, software.
|
| For Cloudflare it's obviously of commerical interest to establish
| a world wide level playing field.
|
| I don't see it happening. Certainly not because of US trade
| interests. Because there is a serious lack of good will towards
| the USA, basically anywhere in the (rest of the) world right now,
| and services are a much bigger part of the economy than
| manufacted produce.
|
| The trend I see is to decouple from the US, and China.
|
| I genuinely couldn't reccomend my own country to make a deal with
| the USA on services. Because we already have a serious issue with
| the dominance of US cloud tech.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Remember when countries had borders and sovereignty before the
| internet?
|
| If you want the benefits of the internet you must open your
| country for foreign influence and destabilizing rot!
|
| I think the idea that we need to take or leave the whole internet
| without compromise is flawed.
| nashashmi wrote:
| US Cloud Act is a trade barrier too.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Unfortunately the US government is _also_ considering site
| blocking with the Block BEARD Act. Which means if USTR actually
| gets anything to stop the foreign blocking, their efforts will
| just turn into "well, it's OK when we do it, but you're a
| pseudocolony of America so you don't get to do it".
| blibble wrote:
| I'm not sure the US wants to bring attention to its massive trade
| surplus in services
|
| if I was the EU I would have responded to the threats of goods
| tariffs with a threat of service tariffs that will start off slow
| and increase every month that tariffs remain in effect
|
| initially 0% tax on Office 365/AWS/facebook+google ad sales, then
| after a year it's 20%, and so-on
| delusional wrote:
| That's exactly what they did. They didn't want to escalate the
| conflict, so they didn't end up using it. It's what they refer
| to as their "trade bazooka", and it's still around ready to be
| used.
| blibble wrote:
| it's not exactly what they did, because a "bazooka" is easy
| defeated by the same ratchet mechanism
|
| the other side will never push enough at once to make bazooka
| style retaliation the correct strategy
| sealeck wrote:
| > because a "bazooka" is easy defeated by the same ratchet
| mechanism
|
| That's an argument for capitulation in general: it's not an
| argument specifically against extending the field of scope
| to include services.
| delusional wrote:
| So what? the US should impose more of them? What a tone-deaf
| statement to make when the American electorate elected Mr trade
| barrier.
| golemotron wrote:
| This comes from the dated perspective that free trade is
| universally good. Nations create their own trade rules and they
| ought to be able to enforce them. I consider that far preferable
| than attempts to exert extraterritorial control over services
| from other countries.
|
| If, say, Uruguay doesn't like content on Facebook, they are free
| to block it. In their opinion, they are protecting their citizens
| and that's ok. It should not produce legal action that could
| result in least common denominator style global content
| censorship.
|
| In an ideal world, there would be no country level blocking but
| invariably laws will differ.
| grayhatter wrote:
| > This comes from the dated perspective that free trade is
| universally good.
|
| lol, ok, I'll bite. Other than one side might try to change the
| rules; why should I believe is free trade is no longer
| universally good? What is the specific argument?
|
| Because if the argument is that one side might impose taxes,
| duh? But that's no longer free trade is it?
|
| If both sides were willing to play fair, why wouldn't that be
| better? And why shouldn't we all be trying to "encourage"
| everyone to play fair?
| golemotron wrote:
| There are many arguments but the most straightforward one is
| that a country may decide that preserving particular
| industries is in their security interest. That can be
| extended to culture as well.
|
| Japan closed itself off from the world for centuries during
| the Edo period. One could say that they suffered economically
| due to that, but on the other hand, they ended up creating
| one of the more unique cultures in the world, developing in
| ways very different from others. It's an interesting kind of
| diversity.
| foxglacier wrote:
| Food production is a huge one. We don't want highly optimized
| farming where only the most efficient growers feed everyone
| else because that has the risk of global famine if something
| fails there. The more a system is optimized, the closer to
| failure it is. Same goes for all other kinds of production
| but food is really important compared to, say, CPUs or cars.
| manishsharan wrote:
| Fine .. say your country has a several years of drought and
| bad harvest. What happens then ? Do you trade then ?
|
| Or .. lets say due to weather, your farmers can not grow
| enough oranges or some fruit which drives up local prices.
| Should only the richest people in your country get to eat
| fruits ?
|
| Or you discover lithium deposits that your national
| industry can not use . Should you let that just sit there
| knowing it could make your province prosperous if traded.
| golemotron wrote:
| Sure, you can trade but it is a choice. Claiming that
| free trade is universally good is saying that there is
| only one right choice - no barriers.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Previously the WTO ruled that USA had imposed illegal trade
| barriers against Antigua that violate the GATS treaty by
| attempting to criminalise any website in any country that takes
| wagers from Americans[0]. I'm pretty sure any site blocking
| effort would violate the same treaty, but those cases can't be
| taken to the WTO due to the USA blocking appointments to the WTO
| appellate body since 2019 [1]
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigua#Online_gambling
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body
| yorwba wrote:
| The US lost in the gambling case because their restrictions on
| foreign websites were stricter than those on domestic ones. The
| GATS doesn't prohibit countries from regulating trade, they
| only have to do so in a non-discriminatory manner. Spain isn't
| blocking foreign websites for copyright infringement that would
| be legal domestically, so they're in compliance with their
| obligations.
| reisse wrote:
| For God's sake, Cloudflare is the last effin company to speak
| about site blocking. I can only quote myself from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45059003 :
|
| > In my opinion, Cloudflare does a lot more censoring than all
| state actors combined, because they singlehandedly decide if the
| IP you use is "trustworthy" or "not", and if they decided it is
| not, you're cut off from like half of the Internet, and the only
| thing you can do is to look for another one. I'd really like if
| their engineers understood what Orwellian mammoth have they
| created and resign, but for now they're only bragging without the
| realization. Or at least if any sane antitrust or comms agency
| shred their business in pieces.
| riskable wrote:
| Imagine the bureaucracy, trying to manage IPv6-based blocking.
|
| MPAA: "Yeah, we're going to need to you to add eighteen
| quintillion more addresses to the block list..."
| shevy-java wrote:
| That's actually an interesting take. I have not thought about it
| from that point of view. It's kind of strange how people in the
| same government come up with orthogonal decisions - the left hand
| doesn't know what the right hand does and vice versa.
|
| Clouflare actually does have a point. If you censor xyz, then you
| may also censor some businesses that are legitimate and pay
| taxes.
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| It's sad to see Spain and Italy disrupt the Internet so badly
| over copyright/IP stuff, of all things.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| We have a technical mechanism now to be able to disambiguate the
| reputations of customers behind a single network - ASNs.
|
| Why doesn't cloudflare require its more difficult customers to
| have an ASN - then their reputation and cloudflares can be more
| easily separated. This wouldn't have to rely on flimsy static IP
| lists either.
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