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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

#41

Post by Taek »

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…

I was actually like 30 years old when I realized "EU" meant "European Union" and wasn't a 2 letter abbreviation for the continent of Europe. In the US, we call states by their two letter abbreviations (IL, NY, CA, etc), often call countries by 2 letter abbreviations too (depends on the country, but JP, AR, CR come to mind as common examples), so it's a pretty natural assumption to think of 'EU' as 'all of the continent Europe, independent of whether they participate in the governing body known as the European Union'

If you substitute the GP for 'pretty typical European play' it makes plenty of sense.

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

#42

Post by ACCount37 »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #23
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'm still kinda confused as to how this works. Doesn't every cloud connected or IoT device just die during a football game in Spain?

Yes. And, who cares really? Maybe the users do, but the Spanish government certainly doesn't!

How cheap, I wonder, does a government have to be to sell itself out over ball game broadcasting rights? Could someone like Elon Musk just fly in there and acquire the entire government with some pocket change?

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

#43

Post by pyrale »

ACCount37 wrote: post #38

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.

> If US Trade Office can be leveraged to destroy internet censorship efforts in other countries, then so be it.

...But, of course, US corporations enforcing the same kind of censoring is a-OK, because corporations are people and their censorship is free speech.

I'll be open to your posititon the day Boticelli's Venus doesn't get censored on FB because there's a pair of tits somewhere on the painting.

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

#44

Post by quentindanjou »

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.

> Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.

I assume you must be American. I always find it funny that there is that US belief that Europe is "old-fashioned" with "old tech" and "old progress". I never encountered anyone yet to tell me what progress wasn't in Europe that was in the US.

I actually think this is a bit backward, with US lack of transportation funding, more people struggling with poverty, backward ecological measures, and missing health care with lower life expectancy.

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

#45

Post by antonvs »

bob1029 wrote: post #4
digitalsushi wrote: post #3

i havent been in a tier 1 ISP in 20 years. can anyone who is in that life give a little summary of how much infrastructure we have in the united states to implement the same level of control as what china has available for walling its garden? like, if the direction came down from on high, to copy it ... how few things would have to get flipped on to have roughly the same thing in the united states? i'd really appreci…

> how few things would have to get flipped on to have roughly the same thing in the united states? I'd argue it's already been flipped on. Our system just works a little bit differently. Nothing is strictly prohibited via some grand theatrical firewall. Things that are "undesirable" simply meet an information theoretical death sooner than they otherwise should. We've got mountains of tools like DMCA that can precisio…

> Things that are "undesirable" simply meet an information theoretical death sooner than they otherwise should.

A good example is how payment processors (mainly the major credit card companies) police adult sites, forcing them to ban certain keywords. It's a weird situation in which the role of morality police is played at the point where control can naturally be exercised in a capitalist economy.

As we'd expect, that same pattern is repeated elsewhere, e.g. in social networks that censor in all sorts of ways, many of them explicitly intended to reinforce the status quo and neutralize or undermine dissent.

When you have an authoritarian government, all of this tends to happen more centrally. But democracies tend to distribute this function throughout the economy and society.

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

#46

Post by Cyph0n »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #10
bob1029 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how few things would have to get flipped on to have roughly the same thing in the united states? I'd argue it's already been flipped on. Our system just works a little bit differently. Nothing is strictly prohibited via some grand theatrical firewall. Things that are "undesirable" simply meet an information theoretical death sooner than they otherwise should. We've got mountains of tools like DMCA that can precisio…

> I'd argue it's already been flipped on. The Great Firewall is, among various other things, an attempt to create a single historical narrative for the PRC by blocking out reference to things like Tiananmen, discussions of early twentieth-century China suggesting that China could have gone a different way than the Communist Party and prospered, etc. The USA has absolutely nothing like that, people can readily find op…

This is changing, because the ruling class of politicians and billionaires is discovering that things can actually change if they don’t control the narrative, especially in the age of social media.

Read up on the motivations behind the TikTok acquisition, or the attempts to legislatively censor certain topics on Wikipedia, or the myriad of knobs used by social media “content review” teams etc, or Chat Control in the EU, or going back further, the surveillance systems detailed in the Snowden leaks (why surveil if censorship isn’t the goal?).

It’s ultimately exactly the same reasoning as that used by the CCP, but in a more subtle and gradual manner. Yes, right now, the GFW is a different beast, but if we do nothing, I would wager that the solutions will converge.

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

#47

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

tiahura wrote: post #35
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

And when other countries don't play ball? Then we shut down those backbones, and it's the United States that is isolate, not Russia (though please feel free to pick another target if you don't like Russia). No one's cutting off China, not without their economy dropping dead. Sure, maybe there's some country that you could do this to... but that country is so unimportant that they're probably already almost-cut-off anyway. You don't even get to to do this to a Brazil or Indonesia, let alone any country that matters.

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

#48

Post by em-bee »

ACCount37 wrote: post #38

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.

it's not so much the US Trade Office, but this needs to be considered in any international trade agreements.

blocking that interferes with access to legitimate sites that i might use to buy or sell products and communicate with potential customers should be a violation of these agreements.

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

#49

Post by ACCount37 »

tiahura wrote: post #13

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

This boneheaded idea of "just block the Bad Countries from our Good Web" needs to die a miserable death.

Countries like Russia or China spend billions on controlling the flow of information on their own land. Countries like Iran go out of their way to blackhole the traffic whenever any disruptions or political violence happens in the country, and for every Nepal, where this backfired terribly, there's a dozen cases of countries doing that and getting away with it. And you're proposing we just help the authoritarians out by doing their dirty work for them.

Sure, let's do that! Give their propagandists a win, leave everyone who's in those countries now hang out to dry in an information black hole! Let the abuses perpetuated by their own governments go unseen and unheard! All to preserve the Good Web, For Good People Only.

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

#50

Post by RobKohr »

pyrale wrote: post #43
ACCount37 wrote: post #38

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.

> If US Trade Office can be leveraged to destroy internet censorship efforts in other countries, then so be it. ...But, of course, US corporations enforcing the same kind of censoring is a-OK, because corporations are people and their censorship is free speech. I'll be open to your posititon the day Boticelli's Venus doesn't get censored on FB because there's a pair of tits somewhere on the painting.

Facebook is a single website. Other websites can host it just fine.

This is the same as blocking content on your own forum or comment section on your blog. Yes fb is huge, but still just a website, and one with fading popularity.

Blocking ips on a network level is different.

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