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Cloudflare tells U.S. govt that foreign site blocking efforts are trade barriers

328 points by iamnothere 1y ago

giorgioz 1y ago
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_use_cloudflare_websites_in_spain_while/ 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    Also people in Spain are learning to use VPNs.
- ronsor 1y ago
  Regardless of my opinion of soccer pirates, I still hate copyright clowns more.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- freedomben 1y ago
  Cloudflare isn't defending the pirate streaming sites, they are simply living their principles of being neutral.
- ivl 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    "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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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/subresources/ip_lists/methods/get/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/intel/subres...
  - em-bee 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  At first they came for the 4k bluray rips
  - blitzar 1y ago
    Then they came for the Linux ISOs
- sidewndr46 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      OK - well thanks for explaining that. Maybe this will motivate digital sovereignty at a personal level?
    - immibis 1y ago
      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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
beardyw 1y ago
"Trade barriers" - mmm, I wonder who's attention they are trying to get.
stego-tech 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
ivl 1y ago
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 1y ago
  > 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.
  - blitzar 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - antonvs 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
      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".
      - 1y ago
tiahura 1y ago
Backbone operators in the US should not be allowed to connect to networks that connect to low trust countries.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      >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.
moralestapia 1y ago
That's true.
ACCount37 1y ago
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.
- em-bee 1y ago
  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.
- pyrale 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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.
BartjeD 1y ago
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 1y ago
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.
- asacrowflies 1y ago
  So you agree with the long standing China model?
nashashmi 1y ago
US Cloud Act is a trade barrier too.
kmeisthax 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      > 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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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.
RobotToaster 1y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigua#Online_gambling [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body
- yorwba 1y ago
  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 1y ago
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 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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
It's sad to see Spain and Italy disrupt the Internet so badly over copyright/IP stuff, of all things.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
everfrustrated 1y ago
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.
toastal 1y ago
I remember trying to get my absentee ballot information & the county I am registered in blocked requests from abroad.

328 points by iamnothere 1y ago

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_use_cloudflare_websites_in_spain_while/ 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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  Also people in Spain are learning to use VPNs.
ronsor 1y ago
Regardless of my opinion of soccer pirates, I still hate copyright clowns more.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
freedomben 1y ago
Cloudflare isn't defending the pirate streaming sites, they are simply living their principles of being neutral.
ivl 1y ago
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 1y ago
  "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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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/subresources/ip_lists/methods/get/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/intel/subres...
- em-bee 1y ago
  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 1y ago
At first they came for the 4k bluray rips
- blitzar 1y ago
  Then they came for the Linux ISOs
sidewndr46 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    OK - well thanks for explaining that. Maybe this will motivate digital sovereignty at a personal level?
  - immibis 1y ago
    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 1y ago
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 1y ago

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 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago

beardyw 1y ago

"Trade barriers" - mmm, I wonder who's attention they are trying to get.

stego-tech 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.

ivl 1y ago

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 1y ago
> 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.
- blitzar 1y ago
  [flagged]
- antonvs 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    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".
    - 1y ago

tiahura 1y ago

Backbone operators in the US should not be allowed to connect to networks that connect to low trust countries.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    >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.

moralestapia 1y ago

That's true.

ACCount37 1y ago

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.

em-bee 1y ago
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.
pyrale 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.

BartjeD 1y ago

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 1y ago

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.

asacrowflies 1y ago
So you agree with the long standing China model?

nashashmi 1y ago

US Cloud Act is a trade barrier too.

kmeisthax 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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.

RobotToaster 1y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigua#Online_gambling [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body

yorwba 1y ago
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 1y ago

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 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 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago

It's sad to see Spain and Italy disrupt the Internet so badly over copyright/IP stuff, of all things.

deleted 1y ago

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everfrustrated 1y ago

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.

toastal 1y ago

I remember trying to get my absentee ballot information & the county I am registered in blocked requests from abroad.