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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

#51

Post by iamnothere »

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.

Whataboutism. I am no fan of CF or current US trade policy, but I’ll take whatever wins we can get when it comes to internet freedom.

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

#52

Post by encom »

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…

It's not totally comparable, but if you went against the approved covid narrative a few years ago, you would absolutely get shut down by the big players for "misinformation". Same with the 2020 US election results. And in many cases they acted on behalf of the goverment:

https://time.com/7015026/meta-facebook-zuckerberg-covid-bide...

Misinformation or not, I like form my opinions myself, rather than have the government do it for me. There was absolutely a lot of nonsense[1] going around during covid, but constantly being told what to believe felt extremely irksome.

[1] https://youtu.be/sSkFyNVtNh8

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

#53

Post by nicole_express »

R_D_Olivaw wrote: post #40
antonvs wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

In the United States, "North America" and "South America" are generally treated as separate continents, so therefore as a whole are called "the Americas". This frees up the singular "America" to refer to the US without too much risk of ambiguity. My understanding is that in some places, especially non-English speaking, is that North and South America are treated as a single continent called "America", which adds ambiguity.

People often get confused by divisions like this because they feel like they should be real in an objective sense, but continents are almost entirely social constructs. (There is a North American tectonic plate, and that's real, but it doesn't quite line up with the continent)

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

#54

Post by BartjeD »

It is a trade barrier... For services. And that's the ciritical bit of information.

Most international trade agreements don't cover services in in a comprehensive manner. Because they are so varied and difficult to regulate. E.g. banking, sales, advice, software.

For Cloudflare it's obviously of commerical interest to establish a world wide level playing field.

I don't see it happening. Certainly not because of US trade interests. Because there is a serious lack of good will towards the USA, basically anywhere in the (rest of the) world right now, and services are a much bigger part of the economy than manufacted produce.

The trend I see is to decouple from the US, and China.

I genuinely couldn't reccomend my own country to make a deal with the USA on services. Because we already have a serious issue with the dominance of US cloud tech.

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

#55

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

Remember when countries had borders and sovereignty before the internet?

If you want the benefits of the internet you must open your country for foreign influence and destabilizing rot!

I think the idea that we need to take or leave the whole internet without compromise is flawed.

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

#56

Post by blahgeek »

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…

There are actually two part of mechanisms in China to wall its garden.

The first part is GFW, with which people outside of China is more familiar. It operates at every international internet cable, analyzing and dynamically blocks traffic in realtime. China only have few sites that connects to international internet, with very limited bandwidth (few Tbps in total), so it's more feasible. But overall speaking, this is the easy part.

The second part of walling a garden is about controlling what's inside the garden. Every website running in China mainland needs an ICP license from the government, which can take weeks. ISPs must be state-owned (there are 4 of them in total, no local small ISPs whatsoever). Residential IPs cannot be used for serving websites because the inbound traffic of well-known ports are blocked, which is required by the law. VPN apps are illegal. etc. These are things that are much harder to do in other countries.

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

#57

Post by ineedasername »

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".

Probably because most adults in the US grew up and were educated at a time when the EU was, comparative to today, insignificant in # of countries, population, GDP, and general importance, and so very little talked about in either news or text books compared to Europe as an economic and political block. And since Europe was abbreviated 'Eur' well, easy to see how dropping the 'r' hasn't resulted in universal US intuition that it's not the same thing. In general though it does seem pretty understandable to think something calling itself "The European Union" is comprised of just about all of Europe. Especially back with the expanded in '93 countries it was a little presumptuous at only a small fraction of the continent getting together and calling itself that? I do remember learning something about it in school at the time, under the EEC name.

Want to avoid confusion? Call it something like "United Nations", 'UN'. Confusion solved, Americans happy, call off the tariffs, peace, etc.

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

#58

Post by ineedasername »

R_D_Olivaw wrote: post #40
antonvs wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

That would be the same grind to a halt you'd get on just about anyone's face when they have a random stranger try to explain something obvious in a rude and condescending way. The inside voice goes something like: "Do I walk by, is this person sane, or maybe say something equally condescending like 'Hey buddy, with the bombs we have it will be called whatever we want.'"

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

#59

Post by ozgrakkurt »

RobKohr wrote: post #50
pyrale wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Facebook isn’t just a website. Like whatsapp isn’t just a messaging app and visa/mastercard aren’t just some of the credit card companies.

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

#60

Post by robocat »

RobKohr wrote: post #50
pyrale wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> fading popularity

You made that up, or you checked stats?

A quick Google says that Facebook is still growing at about 5% and that Meta revenue is up a lot.

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