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

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

#31

Post by wbl »

mikkupikku wrote: post #18
stego-tech wrote: post #11

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 rig…

"Defend literal pirates" - imagine if it was the opposite; if the only way to keep a site on the internet without being ddosed into oblivion was to use Cloudflare but also they only permit sites which are approved of by corporate interests. That would be very dystopian. The root problem of course is their de facto monopoly status, as gatekeepers of the internet (if they aren't secretly an NSA run company, the NSA is…

Akamai, CloudFront, whatever Googles service is, a bunch of other ones I can't think of compete in the same market. Cloudflare obviously is good at what they do but there decently are many fine CDN/DDOs prevention companies.

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

#32

Post by benatkin »

ivl wrote: post #9
giorgioz wrote: post #2

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_u... I decided to go back to AWS. Frankly Cloudflare is choosing the wrong battle on…

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.

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/subres...

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

#33

Post by victorbjorklund »

ivl wrote: post #12

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.

Does not have anything to do with EU. But nice try.

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

#34

Post by antonvs »

embedding-shape wrote: post #14
ivl wrote: post #12

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.

> 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, Sp…

> 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".

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

#35

Post by tiahura »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #25
tiahura wrote: post #13

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

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 (ev…

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.

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

#36

Post by iamnothere »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #25
tiahura wrote: post #13

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

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 (ev…

Exactly, this would just result in a global game of whack-a-mole. It is possible in autocracies that are mostly excluded from global trade, like North Korea, but China for example can’t afford to cut itself off without collapsing its economy. (It has the Great Firewall, but that does not block entire countries, and is often quite leaky.)

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

#37

Post by troupo »

ivl wrote: post #12

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.

> But, it's a pretty typical EU play. Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.

EU is literally about removing protections for established interests: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e...

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

#38

Post by ACCount37 »

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.

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

#39

Post by benatkin »

hypeatei wrote: post #5
giorgioz wrote: post #2

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_u... I decided to go back to AWS. Frankly Cloudflare is choosing the wrong battle on…

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.

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.

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

#40

Post by R_D_Olivaw »

antonvs wrote: post #34
embedding-shape wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, Sp…

> 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".

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".

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