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French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

torrentfreak.com

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Re: French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

#12

The title on the website is “Google, Cloudflare & Cisco Will Poison DNS to Stop Piracy Block Circumvention”. Curious why Cloudflare has been singled out in the submission title?

They're the most respected / most surprising?

Doubtful.

Re: French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

#13

Over a decade ago, a ton of tech companies (including Google) coordinated a “blackout the Internet” day of protest against U.S. legislation that would have required them to alter DNS to fight piracy. Interesting that now that France actually does it, they say they will comply. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PI...

In the last decade Tech has become part of the establishment. They are one of the dominant controlling forces.

The blackout was _not_ about preserving free speech, or any other moral high road. It was purely about control. Tech hadn’t yet cemented their position as a dominant player and didn’t want to cede the control they had.

Now that they’ve embedded themselves in the ruling class they don’t care as much because they already have control.

Re: French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

#14

Over a decade ago, a ton of tech companies (including Google) coordinated a “blackout the Internet” day of protest against U.S. legislation that would have required them to alter DNS to fight piracy. Interesting that now that France actually does it, they say they will comply. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PI...

In the last decade Tech has become part of the establishment. They are one of the dominant controlling forces. The blackout was _not_ about preserving free speech, or any other moral high road. It was purely about control. Tech hadn’t yet cemented their position as a dominant player and didn’t want to cede the control they had. Now that they’ve embedded themselves in the ruling class they don’t care as much because t…

This is the right line of thinking. My interpretation is slightly different - I think the tech companies have run afoul of various norms when it comes to things like the privacy of customers, anti-trust, taxation, etc. Because they are now reliant on these unethical ways of holding onto economic power or growing their economic power, they need to not get into trouble with governments. This means playing nice with them so that they do not become subject to legislation that will rein them in.

Re: French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

#15
Is there some decentralized anti-censorship technology that can prevent this type of action, where ISPs and DNS providers and other points of centralization are forced to implement things on behalf of other parties (like Canal+ or a government)?

Re: French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

#16
One of the interesting technical questions is how these vendors will choose to reflect the forbidden DNS entries in protocols like DoH where they have a choice. For example a reasonable thing for a DoH server to say when asked a DNS question it has been forbidden to answer truthfully, is HTTP 451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons.

Re: French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

#17

Is there some decentralized anti-censorship technology that can prevent this type of action, where ISPs and DNS providers and other points of centralization are forced to implement things on behalf of other parties (like Canal+ or a government)?

Decentralized and global consensus are contradictory properties, in order to have an otherwise arbitrary ASCII string resolve to a particular machine EVERYWHERE, you need a central authority to say who's who.

If you just want to prevent other central authorities (e.g. France) from barging in on the existing central authorities your computer expects to get answers from (e.g. ICANN, Verisign etc) there are plenty of projects for semiuncensoring DNS in a distributed way. But nobody is stopping, say, the US from doing to ICANN or Verisign what France is doing to CloudFlare and Google.

Re: French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

#18

The title on the website is “Google, Cloudflare & Cisco Will Poison DNS to Stop Piracy Block Circumvention”. Curious why Cloudflare has been singled out in the submission title?

Same concern here.

Also, the phrasing in both, but especially the HN title made me think Cloudflare chose to do something, but it turns out the French court is forcing all of them.

Re: French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

#20

Over a decade ago, a ton of tech companies (including Google) coordinated a “blackout the Internet” day of protest against U.S. legislation that would have required them to alter DNS to fight piracy. Interesting that now that France actually does it, they say they will comply. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PI...

In the last decade Tech has become part of the establishment. They are one of the dominant controlling forces. The blackout was _not_ about preserving free speech, or any other moral high road. It was purely about control. Tech hadn’t yet cemented their position as a dominant player and didn’t want to cede the control they had. Now that they’ve embedded themselves in the ruling class they don’t care as much because t…

Tech has always been part of the establishment, funded by capital trying to solve capital's problems. The only part of tech that really deviates from this is the free software community, which has always been hostile to capital. The blackout day emerged from people, not the industry, and people have changed.
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