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> the fact is that cloudflare are providing access to illegal content Why make CloudFlare ultimately responsible though? There are lots of companies between us

by pier25 6mo ago

> the fact is that cloudflare are providing access to illegal content Why make CloudFlare ultimately responsible though? There are lots of companies between users and the servers providing pirated content. Cloudflare is just one step in the whole chain. Why not eg block Google Chrome? In any case, blocking Cloudflare was a stupid thing to do. Especially because it didn't anything to solve the actual problem.

charcircuit 6mo ago
Because they own the IPs that pirates are connecting to which makes it relevant for those IPs to be blocked. They are the easiest IPs to find since you can just resolve the domain of the piracy site.
- eggprices 6mo ago
  Why are the IPs the relevant things? There are domains as well. And origin servers. Why not block the domain or the origin server, which wouldn't have collateral damage.
dwedge 6mo ago
Cloudflare provide a service masking the IP address of the illegal content, really you know the answer to when them and not Chrome
- akersten 6mo ago
  Okay and Chrome provide a service displaying the illegal content to the user. What now?
  - dwedge 6mo ago
    Can you get closer to the source than chrome? Can you get closer to the source than cloudflare? Don't be disingenuous just because you like the company.
    - pier25 6mo ago
      It's disingenuous to believe there was any merit in blocking Cloudflare. Not only this was never going to solve the piracy problem but it was always more of a pissing context. Furthermore, La Liga somehow convinced the courts they should be able to pick IPs for all ISPs to block in real-time without any oversight from the law. Considering this is a private company this is just absolutely insane.
    - otherme123 6mo ago
      Sure I can: whatever hosting service they are using. Find where they are hosted, e.g. AWS, and ask Amazon to bring a zone down for Spain for 5 hours.
      - dwedge 6mo ago
        "find out where they are hosted" is doing a lot of lifting here against a massive company whose business model is hiding where end users are hiding.
        eggprices 6mo ago
        They reply to subpoenas just like everyone else. But that's too slow for the greedy fat cats at LaLiga.
embedding-shape 6mo ago
> Why not eg block Google Chrome? I think you're not faithfully trying to adopt their perspective here, even if you don't agree with it (just like me). They need (in their mind, again I don't agree) to block these sites somehow, as they see it as them "stealing" viewers, judges agree with this. Now, where can the block be done, and have the least amount of collateral? Cloudflare is not playing ball and turning of the streams, and they appear too quickly to go through court orders all the time. Banning a web browser obviously has a huge scope, so you're effectively left with blocking based IP, DNS or both/either. Considering they are breaking local laws, and judges feel like something should be done to stop that, the solution they arrived at, regardless of how shit it is, is probably the solution with the least collateral damage, even if it has quite a lot. Again, I don't agree with the decision, but I can also see from their perspective that they don't have a ton of choices, if we adopt the perspective that it should be stopped somehow.
- pier25 6mo ago
  > I think you're not faithfully trying to adopt their perspective here I think you're not seeing the bigger picture. Somehow La Liga (a private company) was able to convince the courts that it should be able to ban IPs almost in real-time without any oversight from the law. This is just insane in a modern democracy and only benefitted La Liga. Certainly not the population of Spain for whom the courts work for. Time has proven what anyone with two brain cells knew already. Blocking IPs was never going to do much to solve the issue. It's a wack-a-mole game. Cloudflare knew this and La Liga did too. > where can the block be done, and have the least amount of collateral? Blocking one of the biggest providers of internet infra was anything but "the least amount of collateral". Plenty of companies and services depend on Cloudflare.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    > Blocking IPs was never going to do much to solve the issue. It's a wack-a-mole game. But that in their mind is "solving the issue, at that time". Why do you think they want to expand it to other sports now, because "doesn't do anything" or because they actually see some effect from it? > Blocking one of the biggest providers of internet infra was anything but "the least amount of collateral". Plenty of companies and services depend on Cloudflare. Ok, so given their perspective is "something must be done" and Cloudflare are not blocking the users after requests, what is the alternative here? Turning off the entire internet connection for individual users? Turning off all the internet during games? I really don't know what alternative could be possible, that still satisfies their "something must be done". Again, I agree that this is an massive overstep, wildly miscalculated and I'm personally affected by this every time a football is on, I don't like it either.
_flux 6mo ago
I think the difference is that Cloudflare is the one party providing streaming access for their customers: not just anyone can proxy the data through Cloudflare, they need to be a Cloudflare customer first. When I'm posting this message to Hacker News, I'm the "customer" of this website. I'm not customer of all the intermediate nodes in the chain. So if I were to write something illegal and HN would be irresponsive to takedown requests, the courts could order the IP of HN to be blocked, not some intermediate ISP.
- eggprices 6mo ago
  You're the customer of your ISP who's the customer of another ISP who's the customer of another ISP who Hacker News is a customer of. The Digital Markets Act speaks of "conduits" instead of speaking of the specific form the conduits may take. It does not give special rights to someone who forwards IP packets unmodified or to someone who receives IP packets and reissues other IP packets or to someone who changes the IP addresses in the packets. It only cares about the net effect of the transmission, and the fact is that Cloudflare is a conduit with caching.

by pier25 6mo ago

charcircuit 6mo ago

Because they own the IPs that pirates are connecting to which makes it relevant for those IPs to be blocked. They are the easiest IPs to find since you can just resolve the domain of the piracy site.

eggprices 6mo ago
Why are the IPs the relevant things? There are domains as well. And origin servers. Why not block the domain or the origin server, which wouldn't have collateral damage.

dwedge 6mo ago

Cloudflare provide a service masking the IP address of the illegal content, really you know the answer to when them and not Chrome

akersten 6mo ago
Okay and Chrome provide a service displaying the illegal content to the user. What now?
- dwedge 6mo ago
  Can you get closer to the source than chrome? Can you get closer to the source than cloudflare? Don't be disingenuous just because you like the company.
  - pier25 6mo ago
    It's disingenuous to believe there was any merit in blocking Cloudflare. Not only this was never going to solve the piracy problem but it was always more of a pissing context. Furthermore, La Liga somehow convinced the courts they should be able to pick IPs for all ISPs to block in real-time without any oversight from the law. Considering this is a private company this is just absolutely insane.
  - otherme123 6mo ago
    Sure I can: whatever hosting service they are using. Find where they are hosted, e.g. AWS, and ask Amazon to bring a zone down for Spain for 5 hours.
    - dwedge 6mo ago
      "find out where they are hosted" is doing a lot of lifting here against a massive company whose business model is hiding where end users are hiding.
      - eggprices 6mo ago
        They reply to subpoenas just like everyone else. But that's too slow for the greedy fat cats at LaLiga.

embedding-shape 6mo ago

> Why not eg block Google Chrome? I think you're not faithfully trying to adopt their perspective here, even if you don't agree with it (just like me). They need (in their mind, again I don't agree) to block these sites somehow, as they see it as them "stealing" viewers, judges agree with this. Now, where can the block be done, and have the least amount of collateral? Cloudflare is not playing ball and turning of the streams, and they appear too quickly to go through court orders all the time. Banning a web browser obviously has a huge scope, so you're effectively left with blocking based IP, DNS or both/either. Considering they are breaking local laws, and judges feel like something should be done to stop that, the solution they arrived at, regardless of how shit it is, is probably the solution with the least collateral damage, even if it has quite a lot. Again, I don't agree with the decision, but I can also see from their perspective that they don't have a ton of choices, if we adopt the perspective that it should be stopped somehow.

pier25 6mo ago
> I think you're not faithfully trying to adopt their perspective here I think you're not seeing the bigger picture. Somehow La Liga (a private company) was able to convince the courts that it should be able to ban IPs almost in real-time without any oversight from the law. This is just insane in a modern democracy and only benefitted La Liga. Certainly not the population of Spain for whom the courts work for. Time has proven what anyone with two brain cells knew already. Blocking IPs was never going to do much to solve the issue. It's a wack-a-mole game. Cloudflare knew this and La Liga did too. > where can the block be done, and have the least amount of collateral? Blocking one of the biggest providers of internet infra was anything but "the least amount of collateral". Plenty of companies and services depend on Cloudflare.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  > Blocking IPs was never going to do much to solve the issue. It's a wack-a-mole game. But that in their mind is "solving the issue, at that time". Why do you think they want to expand it to other sports now, because "doesn't do anything" or because they actually see some effect from it? > Blocking one of the biggest providers of internet infra was anything but "the least amount of collateral". Plenty of companies and services depend on Cloudflare. Ok, so given their perspective is "something must be done" and Cloudflare are not blocking the users after requests, what is the alternative here? Turning off the entire internet connection for individual users? Turning off all the internet during games? I really don't know what alternative could be possible, that still satisfies their "something must be done". Again, I agree that this is an massive overstep, wildly miscalculated and I'm personally affected by this every time a football is on, I don't like it either.

_flux 6mo ago

I think the difference is that Cloudflare is the one party providing streaming access for their customers: not just anyone can proxy the data through Cloudflare, they need to be a Cloudflare customer first. When I'm posting this message to Hacker News, I'm the "customer" of this website. I'm not customer of all the intermediate nodes in the chain. So if I were to write something illegal and HN would be irresponsive to takedown requests, the courts could order the IP of HN to be blocked, not some intermediate ISP.

eggprices 6mo ago
You're the customer of your ISP who's the customer of another ISP who's the customer of another ISP who Hacker News is a customer of. The Digital Markets Act speaks of "conduits" instead of speaking of the specific form the conduits may take. It does not give special rights to someone who forwards IP packets unmodified or to someone who receives IP packets and reissues other IP packets or to someone who changes the IP addresses in the packets. It only cares about the net effect of the transmission, and the fact is that Cloudflare is a conduit with caching.