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> 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 WA

> 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 2y ago
The EU companies make payments to Cloudflare, and these could be confiscated. Also any staff in Italy is in danger.
- AdrianB1 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        Connections to foreign computers are not subjected to regulation currently.
        zx8080 2y ago
        > Connections to foreign computers are not subjected to regulation currently. Italy has banned access to Deepseek a couple of weeks ago. Is that different?
        Fornax96 2y ago
        The "refuses ro remove it" part is not even necessary. I run a large cloud storage site, and like all cloud storage it sees some abuse. I have set up a few processes to detect and remove child abuse content. At some point the Police in Italy found some abusive content on my site. They did not inform me, they did not report the files. Instead they just blocked the whole site with a large pedophilia warning. I have been trying to get in contact with the Italian police for months, but there is no working email address on any of the sites, and the people on the phone only speak Italian. It's a pretty hopeless situation.
bakugo 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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?
  - immibis 2y ago
    Italy already blocked Cloudflare once. The Mafia (seriously, it's thought to run a lot of these legal sports things) is a more powerful force in Italy than working internet.
theow939494 2y ago
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 2y ago
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.
- observationist 2y ago
  They need to say "fuck off, then, enjoy EuropeNet" and ignore their demands. There should be zero ambiguity and zero compliance. The internet doesn't work if arbitrary restrictions on speech get imposed. You cannot give a single goddamn inch or they will claw miles away, insidiously inserting their ever growing list of forbidden things.
  - Gud 2y ago
    Child porn? Drug markets?
    - mikrotikker 2y ago
      Classic "what about the children" fallacy
      - Gud 2y ago
        Not at all. The comment I was responding to said the internet doesn’t work with ’arbitrary restrictions’. Let me guess. Parent poster doesn’t consider child pornography an ‘arbitrary restriction’. Who decides what is an ‘arbitrary restriction’? I propose we let a country’s government decide what is a reasonable restriction, not an American corporation. In this case, the Italian government.
        johnisgood 2y ago
        No, we should not let the Government to meddle in people's business at all. Have we not seen enough about the awful consequences of Government intervention? We need less nanny states, not more.
Aachen 2y ago
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
- amiga386 2y ago
  I'm not sure North Korea is a place you'd make a car rental, but this is now 99% of car rentals work: 1. You agree up-front in the contract with the car rental company that you will pay for all fines, parking tickets, etc. you might incur during the rental. You agree ahead of time the rental company won't waste any money defending you, arguing you didn't do it, and will instead pay the whole fine immediately and pass it on to you, and payment will be automatically taken. You always agree this because otherwise they just don't rent the car to you. 2. You incur a fine. 3. The authorities fine the owner of the vehicle, which is the rental company. 4. The rental company immediately bills you for the fine, converted to the currency you paid them in, using your payment details, and they add an extra administrative fee as well. 5. The rental company pays themselves and the fine-issuing authority with your money.
  - williamscales 2y ago
    Indeed this is how it generally works with rentals. GP’s situation can just be reframed as “you get a ticket handed to you for [any small infraction] and leave the country without paying”.
  - vault 2y ago
    > The rental company immediately bills you for the fine ...just to find out the card is blocked :)
miki123211 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - awesome_dude 2y ago
    > basically > probably > bunch > hopefully > pretty sure > almost
    - wruza 2y ago
      What are you trying to say?
      - genewitch 2y ago
        I'm not going to say that this is necessarily true, but why even post anything if you're going to waffle that much?
jimnotgym 2y ago
That is a big 'if' though. Don't CDNs work by having equipment in every country so you don't have to?
- nine_k 2y ago
  They can peer with large local providers / exchanges and rent some of their local storage capacity without owning that equipment, and without having corporate presence in Italy. (You don't have to be German to rent a Hetzner server, do you?)
  - immibis 2y ago
    That's enough of a corporate presence. Whatever they have in Italy can be shut down. You don't get to not follow the law just because you're buying from a vendor.
    - nine_k 2y ago
      Enough to shut down by ordering that the local providers stop providing service to Cloudflare; likely not enough to sue Cloudflare proper. Not a big difference for the customers in Italy.
stock_toaster 2y ago
> If Cloudflare had no physical machines, employees, and property within Italy's borders, under what law could Italy levy a fine? I assume they have _customers_ in Italy though? If so, they [cloudflare] are doing business there. If they have no customers in Italy, then yeah… no clue.
voxic11 2y ago
Imagine an American defrauded a bunch of Italians remotely from America and then when Italy tried to extradite him he claimed that he had never been to Italy so their laws couldn't possibly apply to him. That would obviously be absurd. And similarly since Cloudflare engages in business transactions (albeit remotely) in Italy they must follow Italian law regulating such transactions.
belorn 2y ago
> If Cloudflare had no physical machines, employees, and property within Italy's borders, under what law could Italy levy a fine? https://blog.cloudflare.com/rome-data-center/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/rome-data-center/ They have two data centers in Italy. In term of jurisdiction, global companies tend to have physical machines, employees, and property that is spread out globally. If its not branch offices, it is equipment and remote workers. Cloudflare specifically has a branch office in Portugal and England.

miohtama 2y ago

The EU companies make payments to Cloudflare, and these could be confiscated. Also any staff in Italy is in danger.

AdrianB1 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        Connections to foreign computers are not subjected to regulation currently.
        zx8080 2y ago
        > Connections to foreign computers are not subjected to regulation currently. Italy has banned access to Deepseek a couple of weeks ago. Is that different?
      - Fornax96 2y ago
        The "refuses ro remove it" part is not even necessary. I run a large cloud storage site, and like all cloud storage it sees some abuse. I have set up a few processes to detect and remove child abuse content. At some point the Police in Italy found some abusive content on my site. They did not inform me, they did not report the files. Instead they just blocked the whole site with a large pedophilia warning. I have been trying to get in contact with the Italian police for months, but there is no working email address on any of the sites, and the people on the phone only speak Italian. It's a pretty hopeless situation.

bakugo 2y ago

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 2y ago
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?
- immibis 2y ago
  Italy already blocked Cloudflare once. The Mafia (seriously, it's thought to run a lot of these legal sports things) is a more powerful force in Italy than working internet.

theow939494 2y ago

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 2y ago

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.

observationist 2y ago
They need to say "fuck off, then, enjoy EuropeNet" and ignore their demands. There should be zero ambiguity and zero compliance. The internet doesn't work if arbitrary restrictions on speech get imposed. You cannot give a single goddamn inch or they will claw miles away, insidiously inserting their ever growing list of forbidden things.
- Gud 2y ago
  Child porn? Drug markets?
  - mikrotikker 2y ago
    Classic "what about the children" fallacy
    - Gud 2y ago
      Not at all. The comment I was responding to said the internet doesn’t work with ’arbitrary restrictions’. Let me guess. Parent poster doesn’t consider child pornography an ‘arbitrary restriction’. Who decides what is an ‘arbitrary restriction’? I propose we let a country’s government decide what is a reasonable restriction, not an American corporation. In this case, the Italian government.
      - johnisgood 2y ago
        No, we should not let the Government to meddle in people's business at all. Have we not seen enough about the awful consequences of Government intervention? We need less nanny states, not more.

Aachen 2y ago

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

amiga386 2y ago
I'm not sure North Korea is a place you'd make a car rental, but this is now 99% of car rentals work: 1. You agree up-front in the contract with the car rental company that you will pay for all fines, parking tickets, etc. you might incur during the rental. You agree ahead of time the rental company won't waste any money defending you, arguing you didn't do it, and will instead pay the whole fine immediately and pass it on to you, and payment will be automatically taken. You always agree this because otherwise they just don't rent the car to you. 2. You incur a fine. 3. The authorities fine the owner of the vehicle, which is the rental company. 4. The rental company immediately bills you for the fine, converted to the currency you paid them in, using your payment details, and they add an extra administrative fee as well. 5. The rental company pays themselves and the fine-issuing authority with your money.
- williamscales 2y ago
  Indeed this is how it generally works with rentals. GP’s situation can just be reframed as “you get a ticket handed to you for [any small infraction] and leave the country without paying”.
- vault 2y ago
  > The rental company immediately bills you for the fine ...just to find out the card is blocked :)

miki123211 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
- awesome_dude 2y ago
  > basically > probably > bunch > hopefully > pretty sure > almost
  - wruza 2y ago
    What are you trying to say?
    - genewitch 2y ago
      I'm not going to say that this is necessarily true, but why even post anything if you're going to waffle that much?

jimnotgym 2y ago

That is a big 'if' though. Don't CDNs work by having equipment in every country so you don't have to?

nine_k 2y ago
They can peer with large local providers / exchanges and rent some of their local storage capacity without owning that equipment, and without having corporate presence in Italy. (You don't have to be German to rent a Hetzner server, do you?)
- immibis 2y ago
  That's enough of a corporate presence. Whatever they have in Italy can be shut down. You don't get to not follow the law just because you're buying from a vendor.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    Enough to shut down by ordering that the local providers stop providing service to Cloudflare; likely not enough to sue Cloudflare proper. Not a big difference for the customers in Italy.

stock_toaster 2y ago

> If Cloudflare had no physical machines, employees, and property within Italy's borders, under what law could Italy levy a fine? I assume they have _customers_ in Italy though? If so, they [cloudflare] are doing business there. If they have no customers in Italy, then yeah… no clue.

voxic11 2y ago

Imagine an American defrauded a bunch of Italians remotely from America and then when Italy tried to extradite him he claimed that he had never been to Italy so their laws couldn't possibly apply to him. That would obviously be absurd. And similarly since Cloudflare engages in business transactions (albeit remotely) in Italy they must follow Italian law regulating such transactions.

belorn 2y ago

> If Cloudflare had no physical machines, employees, and property within Italy's borders, under what law could Italy levy a fine? https://blog.cloudflare.com/rome-data-center/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/rome-data-center/ They have two data centers in Italy. In term of jurisdiction, global companies tend to have physical machines, employees, and property that is spread out globally. If its not branch offices, it is equipment and remote workers. Cloudflare specifically has a branch office in Portugal and England.