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

torrentfreak.com

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

#61

Post by kmeisthax »

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…

Cloudflare does not have a monopoly on internet hosting, or even just web application firewalls or DDoS protection. The only thing different about them is that:

1. They have a moderately generous free tier, which they'll aggressively try to upsell you out of the moment they smell money in your wallet.

2. They have an anti-censorship policy that is indistinguishable from the policies of a "bulletproof" hosting company, which means all the DDoS vendors they protect you from are also paying Cloudflare.

This leads me to believe that Cloudflare's protection is less "stringent defense of free speech" and more "you wouldn't want something to happen to that precious website of yours, right?" Like, there's no free speech argument for keeping DDoS vendors online - it's a patently obvious own goal. If someone is selling censorship as a service, then it's obvious, at least to me, that silencing them and them alone would actually make others more free to speak.

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

#63

Post by kmeisthax »

Unfortunately the US government is also considering site blocking with the Block BEARD Act. Which means if USTR actually gets anything to stop the foreign blocking, their efforts will just turn into "well, it's OK when we do it, but you're a pseudocolony of America so you don't get to do it".

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

#64

Post by blibble »

I'm not sure the US wants to bring attention to its massive trade surplus in services

if I was the EU I would have responded to the threats of goods tariffs with a threat of service tariffs that will start off slow and increase every month that tariffs remain in effect

initially 0% tax on Office 365/AWS/facebook+google ad sales, then after a year it's 20%, and so-on

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

#65

Post by iwontberude »

robocat wrote: post #60
RobKohr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Facebook MAU is down from 3.65 B to 3.06 B in the last year

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

#66

Post by cowboy_henk »

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.

That's a bit rich coming from Cloudflare, a company that routinely blocks access to important and legitimate websites to huge parts of the world. A huge part of Cloudflare's customers use them specifically to block users' access to websites.

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

#67

Post by sidewndr46 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #42
sidewndr46 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

OK - well thanks for explaining that. Maybe this will motivate digital sovereignty at a personal level?

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

#69

Post by embedding-shape »

Taek wrote: post #41
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…

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 contine…

Yeah, similarly, growing up as a European, I thought "America" was "the USA", but turns out it's the entire continent, and even "North America" isn't just the US, but the two neighbors too! I don't think it's too bad to be confused about something, we can't be expected to know it all, every time. We learn and move past it :)

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

Not sure even this makes sense, it's not something that is happening Europe wide, and it seems like there is only two countries so far that been engaging in this, with another one thinking about it. For something to be a "pretty typical European play" I'd probably say it has to have happened more times than "twice".

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

#70

Post by mminer237 »

deeth_starr_v wrote: post #30
tiahura wrote: post #13

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

I doubt this would be legal unless proven to be a national security issue (1st amendment grounds).

The First Amendment doesn't apply to non-citizens in foreign countries.
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