6 ms·

This is taking place in a larger geopolitical context. He is applying whatever pressure that Cloudflare can apply on its own (not much), and he mentions Vance a

This is taking place in a larger geopolitical context. He is applying whatever pressure that Cloudflare can apply on its own (not much), and he mentions Vance as a way to call for US administration help at a time when the US is entering an open economic conflict with Europe. Tech and speech regulation is a central feature of that conflict. IMHO this is a time when there are no good players. I support CF’s fight to keep the internet open against encroaching EU regulation while also acknowledging that the US has been a recurring bad actor here. I am not as anti-Cloudflare as some (I have no problem with their pro free speech policies) but I do think centralization of infrastructure is a bad thing, and CF encourages that.

bflesch 10mo ago
"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." I think this clearly shows the hubris of Cloudflare CEO. Cloudflare is simply not important enough in Europe, and he unnecessarily provided a scapegoat "evil US tech company" for European media and politicians to slaughter. In terms of corporate politics it's not clever for him to attach his name to this issue, why not let legal handle this through EU lobby channels the same way other US tech companies do it in Europe.
- sroussey 10mo ago
  Cloudflare should just block Italy altogether.
  - anthk 10mo ago
    Add Spain with LaLiga on top too. Inb4 "the CF CEO it's a right winger", so it's the Soccer -LaLiga- CEO.
- foxglacier 10mo ago
  His hubris isn't news. Remember when he woke up in the middle of the night and blocked some website because he personally didn't like it?
  - bflesch 10mo ago
    No, haven't heard that story. Can you share a source?
    - lkbm 10mo ago
      I suspect this is referring to the removal (not block) of The Daily Stormer in 2017[0]. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
      - lkbm 10mo ago
        Oh, there's also Kiwifarms in 2022: https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/
        lostlogin 10mo ago
        Was anything of value lost? Seriously, what good has ever come out of that cess pit. Yes, that’s a stance that is playing with fire. But is it wrong?
        deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
        lkbm 10mo ago
        I'm not saying it is. I think there's a pretty broad agreement that those sites are bad, and less of them is good. It's much less obvious that we want private corporations (or governments) picking and choosing which sites are good or bad. And from Cloudflare's position, a policy of "we don't police content" is more defensible than "we don't police content, except of this one in particular". These definitely aren't the only two horrible, racist websites Cloudflare has hosted. IIRC (and take this memory with a grain of salt), one thing that angered eastdakota about Stormfront was that they kept saying something like "Cloudflare hasn't kicked us off, so they're okay with us" or something like that. And obviously that doesn't hold water, unless Cloudflare has chosen to kick of some sites, it lends some credence to the remaining ones. I'm undecided where I stand on it. I'd like them to take actions like this in a principled way. (And I'm happy to accept that there's no clear line to draw, nor that it can be enforced with 100% accuracy, but if you're drawing a line, do it thoughtfully and broadcast it so you know ahead of time if you're in their gray area.)
simianparrot 10mo ago
The good players are the US on this front. I say this as a European. Europe at large is in a dark place in terms of freedom of speech, the press, and other issues like immigration. And the US might eventually have to be the ones to apply force to hold our leaders accountable, ironic as that is given history.
- jsiepkes 10mo ago
  > The good players are the US on this front. Don't be fooled. People like Elon aren't pro-free speech. They only want their speech. For example on Elon's X you can call people all kinds of things but calling someone "CIS gendered" is a ban-able offense [1]. Linking to other platforms was also forbidden for a while and in the H1B discussion X shadow banned a bunch of people [2] and I could go on for a while. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2023/07/02/elon-musk-deems-cis-a-twitter-slurheres-why-its-is-so-polarizing/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2023/07/02/elon-mus... [2] https://www.newsweek.com/laura-loomer-elon-musk-x-twitter-h1b-censorship-2008940 https://www.newsweek.com/laura-loomer-elon-musk-x-twitter-h1...
  - redox99 10mo ago
    Him being a hypocrite doesn't make him wrong Do as I say, not as I do.
- pelorat 10mo ago
  They can't even say "fuck" on TV in the USA, and god forbit a female nipple
  - nozzlegear 10mo ago
    That's just a cultural difference between Europeans and Americans, it has nothing to do with freedom of speech in the US.
    - pezezin 10mo ago
      By that logic, everything is a cultural difference...
hermanzegerman 10mo ago
"Tech and speech regulation is a central feature of that conflict" The only conflict is that Europeans don't want Russian Misinformation and Manipulation from foreign powers onto them. It's no accident that Musks X serves preferentially content from European Far-Right Parties. The US used the same argument for their TikTok-Ban/Forced Takeover. They also don't make a secret out of their plan to push the far-right to end the EU. They even wrote about this in their new National Security Strategy Pure Hypocrisy
- joe_mamba 10mo ago
  >They also don't make a secret out of their plan to push the far-right to end the EU. How is the "far right" gonna end "the EU"? When my GF walks alone at night through the parks she's never EVER afraid of the mythical far right for her safety, but the other people the far left won't let us talk about without being called a label and being cancelled from MSM for having common sense opinions. So if the EU were to find its end, it will be 100% at the hand of its own making, from years of corruption and financial mismanagement, from years of pushing unpopular open borders far left policies that nobody was asked it they agree with them or not. That's what will end the EU. Not Musk, not X, not Putin, not Trump, but the EU bureaucrats and their unpopular policies who then use boogiemen like X and "russian misinformation" and "far right" as scapegoats to deflect from their failures like this: Corruption being exposed on X? Must be Russian misinformation. Illegal migrant crime exposed on X. Must be far right misinformation. Epstein Files? Democrat hoax. Etc but you get the point. Politicians hate accountability and media channels they can't control like X that risk exposing their mistakes and corruption. They want full control of media to tell you what's acceptable to think, since the internet and social media made traditional state controlled media obsolete. They don't want control of social media and user ID verification to "protect the children", they want it to protect themselves from criticism and accountability from you. It's not Elon's or Trump's or Putin's or the far right's fault the healthcare in my country has been on a decline for 10+ years. It's not their fault wages are stagnating but property prices are skyrocketing which is what most voters care about. That's the fault of the ECB fiscal policies. It's not their fault public safety is down and crime is up. That's the fault of EU border control and irresponsible migration policies. Etc. you get the point. So it's disingenuous at best and bad faith at worst, to ignore these long going systemic issues the EU has self inflicted on its voters, and just blame the far right for the backlash it has inevitably lead to.
jacquesm 10mo ago
CF is a US company, the EU has the right to make their own - misguided - laws. And CF has the option to simply stop doing business with Italy, or comply with the law. This stupid grandstanding is just a thinly veiled attempt at blackmail which I'm sure will very much impress the legislators and the judges of the country to which it is addressed. /s
aforwardslash 10mo ago
> he mentions Vance as a way to call for US administration help at a time when the US is entering an open economic conflict with Europe This is a great way of bombing its business in the EU. Just sayin' :)
- lagniappe 10mo ago
  This is not as much of a flex as you appear to think it is.
  - aforwardslash 10mo ago
    Look at amazon. They just announced their sovereign cloud offering. That's how you do business, and that's how you stay in business - you dont threaten your customer base.
brightball 10mo ago
Wasn't 1.1.1.1 explicitly created to help people in countries with government internet restrictions to get around them? 100% support whatever Cloudflare has to do to win this fight. IMO the timing of something like this in the middle of the Elon + X vs UK censorship fight with the current administration providing support is probably the best case scenario. People aren't going to want to hear that, but in this case it's probably true.
- greyface- 10mo ago
  > Wasn't 1.1.1.1 explicitly created to help people in countries with government internet restrictions to get around them? No, it was explicitly created to receive and study the stream of "garbage traffic" being sent to 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1, which were previously held by APNIC and donated to Cloudflare on this basis. https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/ > APNIC's research group held the IP addresses 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. While the addresses were valid, so many people had entered them into various random systems that they were continuously overwhelmed by a flood of garbage traffic. APNIC wanted to study this garbage traffic but any time they'd tried to announce the IPs, the flood would overwhelm any conventional network. > We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. We offered Cloudflare's network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.
  - jp57 10mo ago
    By these quotes, it was created to serve "a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system", and the service of help in studying the garbage traffic was offered in exchange for gaining controll of the address(es).
pamcake 10mo ago
I may have missed something but Akamai seem to be living proof that it's possible to operate that kind of business at scale from the US without vice signalling or publicly sucking up to fascist authoritarians.
- bflesch 10mo ago
  Good point.
- kijin 10mo ago
  Akamai doesn't have to, because they don't go attracting the kind of clientele who would host pirated soccer videos.
lostlogin 10mo ago
> the US is entering an open economic conflict with Europe. Whilst ending swathe of agreements, threatening to end NATO and threatening to attack a NATO territory.

bflesch 10mo ago

"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." I think this clearly shows the hubris of Cloudflare CEO. Cloudflare is simply not important enough in Europe, and he unnecessarily provided a scapegoat "evil US tech company" for European media and politicians to slaughter. In terms of corporate politics it's not clever for him to attach his name to this issue, why not let legal handle this through EU lobby channels the same way other US tech companies do it in Europe.

sroussey 10mo ago
Cloudflare should just block Italy altogether.
- anthk 10mo ago
  Add Spain with LaLiga on top too. Inb4 "the CF CEO it's a right winger", so it's the Soccer -LaLiga- CEO.
foxglacier 10mo ago
His hubris isn't news. Remember when he woke up in the middle of the night and blocked some website because he personally didn't like it?
- bflesch 10mo ago
  No, haven't heard that story. Can you share a source?
  - lkbm 10mo ago
    I suspect this is referring to the removal (not block) of The Daily Stormer in 2017[0]. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
    - lkbm 10mo ago
      Oh, there's also Kiwifarms in 2022: https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/
      - lostlogin 10mo ago
        Was anything of value lost? Seriously, what good has ever come out of that cess pit. Yes, that’s a stance that is playing with fire. But is it wrong?
        deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
        lkbm 10mo ago
        I'm not saying it is. I think there's a pretty broad agreement that those sites are bad, and less of them is good. It's much less obvious that we want private corporations (or governments) picking and choosing which sites are good or bad. And from Cloudflare's position, a policy of "we don't police content" is more defensible than "we don't police content, except of this one in particular". These definitely aren't the only two horrible, racist websites Cloudflare has hosted. IIRC (and take this memory with a grain of salt), one thing that angered eastdakota about Stormfront was that they kept saying something like "Cloudflare hasn't kicked us off, so they're okay with us" or something like that. And obviously that doesn't hold water, unless Cloudflare has chosen to kick of some sites, it lends some credence to the remaining ones. I'm undecided where I stand on it. I'd like them to take actions like this in a principled way. (And I'm happy to accept that there's no clear line to draw, nor that it can be enforced with 100% accuracy, but if you're drawing a line, do it thoughtfully and broadcast it so you know ahead of time if you're in their gray area.)

simianparrot 10mo ago

The good players are the US on this front. I say this as a European. Europe at large is in a dark place in terms of freedom of speech, the press, and other issues like immigration. And the US might eventually have to be the ones to apply force to hold our leaders accountable, ironic as that is given history.

jsiepkes 10mo ago
> The good players are the US on this front. Don't be fooled. People like Elon aren't pro-free speech. They only want their speech. For example on Elon's X you can call people all kinds of things but calling someone "CIS gendered" is a ban-able offense [1]. Linking to other platforms was also forbidden for a while and in the H1B discussion X shadow banned a bunch of people [2] and I could go on for a while. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2023/07/02/elon-musk-deems-cis-a-twitter-slurheres-why-its-is-so-polarizing/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2023/07/02/elon-mus... [2] https://www.newsweek.com/laura-loomer-elon-musk-x-twitter-h1b-censorship-2008940 https://www.newsweek.com/laura-loomer-elon-musk-x-twitter-h1...
- redox99 10mo ago
  Him being a hypocrite doesn't make him wrong Do as I say, not as I do.
pelorat 10mo ago
They can't even say "fuck" on TV in the USA, and god forbit a female nipple
- nozzlegear 10mo ago
  That's just a cultural difference between Europeans and Americans, it has nothing to do with freedom of speech in the US.
  - pezezin 10mo ago
    By that logic, everything is a cultural difference...

hermanzegerman 10mo ago

"Tech and speech regulation is a central feature of that conflict" The only conflict is that Europeans don't want Russian Misinformation and Manipulation from foreign powers onto them. It's no accident that Musks X serves preferentially content from European Far-Right Parties. The US used the same argument for their TikTok-Ban/Forced Takeover. They also don't make a secret out of their plan to push the far-right to end the EU. They even wrote about this in their new National Security Strategy Pure Hypocrisy

joe_mamba 10mo ago
>They also don't make a secret out of their plan to push the far-right to end the EU. How is the "far right" gonna end "the EU"? When my GF walks alone at night through the parks she's never EVER afraid of the mythical far right for her safety, but the other people the far left won't let us talk about without being called a label and being cancelled from MSM for having common sense opinions. So if the EU were to find its end, it will be 100% at the hand of its own making, from years of corruption and financial mismanagement, from years of pushing unpopular open borders far left policies that nobody was asked it they agree with them or not. That's what will end the EU. Not Musk, not X, not Putin, not Trump, but the EU bureaucrats and their unpopular policies who then use boogiemen like X and "russian misinformation" and "far right" as scapegoats to deflect from their failures like this: Corruption being exposed on X? Must be Russian misinformation. Illegal migrant crime exposed on X. Must be far right misinformation. Epstein Files? Democrat hoax. Etc but you get the point. Politicians hate accountability and media channels they can't control like X that risk exposing their mistakes and corruption. They want full control of media to tell you what's acceptable to think, since the internet and social media made traditional state controlled media obsolete. They don't want control of social media and user ID verification to "protect the children", they want it to protect themselves from criticism and accountability from you. It's not Elon's or Trump's or Putin's or the far right's fault the healthcare in my country has been on a decline for 10+ years. It's not their fault wages are stagnating but property prices are skyrocketing which is what most voters care about. That's the fault of the ECB fiscal policies. It's not their fault public safety is down and crime is up. That's the fault of EU border control and irresponsible migration policies. Etc. you get the point. So it's disingenuous at best and bad faith at worst, to ignore these long going systemic issues the EU has self inflicted on its voters, and just blame the far right for the backlash it has inevitably lead to.

jacquesm 10mo ago

CF is a US company, the EU has the right to make their own - misguided - laws. And CF has the option to simply stop doing business with Italy, or comply with the law. This stupid grandstanding is just a thinly veiled attempt at blackmail which I'm sure will very much impress the legislators and the judges of the country to which it is addressed. /s

aforwardslash 10mo ago

> he mentions Vance as a way to call for US administration help at a time when the US is entering an open economic conflict with Europe This is a great way of bombing its business in the EU. Just sayin' :)

lagniappe 10mo ago
This is not as much of a flex as you appear to think it is.
- aforwardslash 10mo ago
  Look at amazon. They just announced their sovereign cloud offering. That's how you do business, and that's how you stay in business - you dont threaten your customer base.

brightball 10mo ago

Wasn't 1.1.1.1 explicitly created to help people in countries with government internet restrictions to get around them? 100% support whatever Cloudflare has to do to win this fight. IMO the timing of something like this in the middle of the Elon + X vs UK censorship fight with the current administration providing support is probably the best case scenario. People aren't going to want to hear that, but in this case it's probably true.

greyface- 10mo ago
> Wasn't 1.1.1.1 explicitly created to help people in countries with government internet restrictions to get around them? No, it was explicitly created to receive and study the stream of "garbage traffic" being sent to 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1, which were previously held by APNIC and donated to Cloudflare on this basis. https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/ > APNIC's research group held the IP addresses 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. While the addresses were valid, so many people had entered them into various random systems that they were continuously overwhelmed by a flood of garbage traffic. APNIC wanted to study this garbage traffic but any time they'd tried to announce the IPs, the flood would overwhelm any conventional network. > We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. We offered Cloudflare's network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.
- jp57 10mo ago
  By these quotes, it was created to serve "a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system", and the service of help in studying the garbage traffic was offered in exchange for gaining controll of the address(es).

pamcake 10mo ago

I may have missed something but Akamai seem to be living proof that it's possible to operate that kind of business at scale from the US without vice signalling or publicly sucking up to fascist authoritarians.

bflesch 10mo ago
Good point.
kijin 10mo ago
Akamai doesn't have to, because they don't go attracting the kind of clientele who would host pirated soccer videos.

lostlogin 10mo ago

> the US is entering an open economic conflict with Europe. Whilst ending swathe of agreements, threatening to end NATO and threatening to attack a NATO territory.