https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46555760 ("Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines (twitter.com/eastdakota)"; 1104 comments)
https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492
https://torrentfreak.com/italy-fines-cloudflare-e14-million-...
Italy’s anti-piracy system (Piracy Shield) is a shitshow: too fast, too automated, and often unfair. And "shit happens" is not ok when legit services get blocked too (like Google Drive on 19 Oct 2024).
One point: if a private company can say "we will not comply" and also hint they can pull services from an entire country, this is not legal stuff anymore, it’s soft power. DNS and DDoS protection is infrastructure, and infrastructure is not neutral.
So here we have a critical infrastructure player taking a strong position, and becoming a political actor, and lately it doesn’t always feel accidental.
One more tiny thing: Cloudflare did not fully leave Russia after the 2022 invasion, saying "Russia needs more access to the Internet, not less". So... for me it feels a bit weird to frame this as an "Italian law" problem (valid point), when the real question is: who decides, and with what responsibility, when infrastructure providers should comply or resist?
But I'm sort of an extremist in this regard, I guess. My belief is that companies should be able to choose who they service. So when Google threatened to leave Australia or Canada over the news link taxes, it felt like that's Google's prerogative. I feel the same way about Cloudflare here.
Note that I mostly agree that the Italian anti-piracy system (and these kinds of systems in general) are super problematic, and it's like using a nuke to crack a walnut.
Also, Cloudflare could charge Serie A a ton if money for "Piracy prevention services".
Serie A is not short of cash.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-17/concern-over-asic-int...
They didn’t repeal the law but instead worked out better ways of using the existing powers after a review.
https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/sites/default/files/austra...
Doesn't EU have some kind of net neutrality act? Italy gov can ask DNS resolver to just block pirate sites?
Naturally "rightsholders" abuse this often.
It's essentially a Dachverband of ISPs, bypassing all legal requirements and the judicative system to block domains across all ISPs.
There's this kid who found out about it and scraped their API, then created the cuiiliste [dot] de website where you can check what kind of domains are blocked by ISPs.
The verfassungsblog wrote about it, too, from a legal perspective [1] (German).
> Yet the core issue is infrastructural. For years, Europe has allowed vital parts of the internet to fall into the hands of American companies
Or, is the core infrastructural issue that for the past 20+ years Internet protocols have stalled, yielding capabilities almost exclusively to centralized (and apparently highly concentrated) commercial services.
basically I agree with Cloudflare too, it just bothers me a company has made such an unneutral statement - considering how they has always presented themself
€14 million? What the hell is this desperate witch hunt on piracy lately?
Because piracy is winning.
Its the only way to build a video streaming system that has everything. And its a better user experience for everyone...
Well, other than rights holders.
Italy is doing something immoral and significantly harmful, foreigners considered leaving rather than becoming complicit, this guy is morally offended that foreigners think they’re allowed to not be in Italy.
and they are not simply "foreigners" but the largest web security company serving the country (including public authority websites).
Uh, yes? Obviously? If they're willing to pay a much bigger price in the form of losing all business in the country completely and never visiting again. But the law and fines don't apply globally only to Italy, so if someone is not Italian and is willing to give up on a not insignificant market (and beautiful country) then sure, why wouldn't that be that? Seems like it balances out, I'm sure Cloudflare does way more business than 14M in Italy, so they're not going to be casual about it. And remember, this is just pitting one arbitrary set of business interests (IP monopolists) against another (internet service company and associated customers). Why should Italy be immune from getting pushed on by the second party there and immune from facing the cost tradeoffs? Why privilege the former commercial interests over the latter?
The regulator fined them for not hacking DNS to the whims of the media companies in Italy that want to clamp down on piracy by altering the way DNS works. DNS. The actual "open internet"
I think you may have this backwards.
To me it seems like something they should talk to local Italian ISPs about, not Cloudflare.
The problem is they want to be the people who choose what gets blocked, rather than elected governments.
To me, this whole thing is crazy, certainly pull out if you like, but I'm shocked how many people seem to be siding with the profit-making company over an elected government.
No support. No responses to emails or requests for a review by a human
They also sent a notice to my hosting provider. My hosting provider promptly looked at my site and closed the ticket. It was pretty clear to anyone that the report was malicious.
So yes, Cloudflare censors (to quote Matthew Prince) with "No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency"
Granted this could be just due to lack of staff and support
https://www.ansa.it/canale_tecnologia/notizie/cybersecurity/...
AGCOM is elected?
I say this because the paid services are terrible, and pirating makes things almost too convenient. So it's not even a question of competing with a "free" product, but competing with something that does better and it's cheaper.
> "The crazy stat is that Europe makes more from fining US tech companies than they do from taxing their own technology companies."
That's one way of saying it. Another way is that US companies are so extravagantly huge and violate EU laws so much that the fines are correspondingly huge.
Another way of saying it is that because of transfer pricing, basically nobody knows what money was made where (and the notion of profits per country in a world of multinationals with no capital controls is meaningless).
Heck, HN expressly called on Cloudflare to take up this exact fight[0]; and now that they have, they've still, somehow, managed to turn most of HN against them.
How is that even possible?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43448112 ("Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law (arstechnica.com)"; 9 months ago, 175 comments)
Top-rated comment: "It's one of the rare cases where the sheer size and international influence of companies like Google and Cloudflare can actually do some good for the world by fighting back against such laws."
The twitter rant complete with some weird AI generated image doesn't help.
Most of HN is against Cloudflare by default. They didn't 'turn' anything in this specific event.
In this case your priors are wrong and the parties you should cheer for are reversed.
Are we sure? To me, it seems like a very convenient choice, both economically and politically
Sports conglomerates and their lobbying should kindly fuck off.
If they want to sue a site the old fashioned web for IP infringement that's fine. But that 30 minute thing is absolute bullshit.
I don't even agree with what the Italian government did, but more companies need to do this instead of lobbying for or against laws. No one elected you. The loud voice and influence you wield because of success as a commercial entity does not entitle you a louder voice and power than the citizens of that country. Pull out, if the Italian people don't like the result, they can work on getting things changed. They didn't vote for @eastdakota
Same goes for apple, google, microsoft, signal, twitter, etc.. I fear what all these have in common is the parasitical oligarchy in the US where companies, CEOs and billionaires puppeting the government with the string for everyone to see (what will anyone do about it?), and it doesn't even register for a moment that there is anything abnormal or harmful about it.
In a democracy, the person who controls popular opinion is the ultimate ruler. That person is supposed to be other citizens as individuals.
It’s been known since the ancient Greeks democracy results in oligarchy. It’s why the US was setup as a republic.
Exercise to the reader why everyone thinks democracy is an unassailable good in the world.
plus it will kill their company forever across Europe
DO IT!
(and if the Italians are worried about the olympics, just wait a month and then do it)
Edit: Actually, Cloudflare may have an indirect point in that I also think that access to information should be free. Nonetheless this still does not invalidate what Europe SHOULD do. But the politicians in the EU are not very clever, so ...
Much worse, because in this case hanlon's razor does not apply
I wanna say we (Europeans) are an economic colony of the USA, but I do not have the expertise to do, so...
However, the institutions piss European IT guys off for years (even before the GDPR), but "there are contracts", things continue as they are
I'll just have to disagree with you here.
Why do you think Italy is the good guy here?
This captcha huckster has delusions of grandeur.