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Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

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Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

#111
post #3

I don’t know the backstory but Cloudflare arguing for an open internet is super ironic, presumably he means they want the be the one to close it off and are upset that someone else is ruining their monopoly on it.

USian tech-CEO posting petulant self-serving arguments about "FREEDOM" on twitter? what a cliche

cloudflare have deliberately designed their network so that every IP can serve up every cloudflare website

this means a court order can't block a single cloudflare site without blocking every cloudflare site, causing massive collateral damage

I suspect this is a deliberate business decision: an attempt to raise the "cost" of blocking so high that courts won't attempt to do it at all

and then they make arguments about "it's not technically possible", when it is (farm the target of the orders off to a separate pool of IPs)

and for DNS they could apply a filter based on the source IP country of origin

Prince: please, please, please exercise your empty threat, and withdraw your shitty company's services from Italy

and then you'll watch as Italy then raises it at the EU level, and then you'll have to do the same there too

Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

#112
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One? Elon banned thousands after he took over. He event went as far as personally canceling a Tesla customer's order for criticizing him. That's how petty he is. He has no interest in freedom of speech whatsoever, it's merely a talking point.

I disagree. Freedom of Speech guarantees the right to speak. Not the right to have no repercussions. Elon has GREAT interest in Freedom of Speech, it enables him to have far more power than regulating the type of "speech" he showed in cancelling that customer's order.

he's controlling the speech, not freeing it

Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

#114
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone says they believe in free speech, they have to let me spraypaint anything I want on their house. Otherwise they're a hypocrite.

If they publicly state that the house is a "town square" (he has said that of twitter), and they say that they are a "free speech absolutist" (he has said this of himself in the context of this house/town square/website), and state that "By 'free speech,' I simply mean that which matches the law.", then yes, if they don't let you spray-paint (tweet) whatever you want that's not strictly unlawful (like, ah, calling fo…

Can't throw rotten tomatoes at internet nazis in the nazi "town square" unfortunately.

Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone says they believe in free speech, they have to let me spraypaint anything I want on their house. Otherwise they're a hypocrite.

When Musk bought twitter, he all-but-explicitly said "I have finally bought this house, which I will let anyone spray paint".

except for trans people and all the people he banned that disagree with him

Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

#116
post #96
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the Italian bureaucrats really want to ban something in France or Germany? The Cloudflare CEO is clearly misinterpreting something that was lost in translation, which is the bureaucrats stating "Cloudflare must prevent access to XY from everywhere". For bureaucrats "everywhere" means "in my jurisdiction". I cannot believe that the Cloudflare CEO is trying to nitpick around a single word that he so clearl…

[flagged]

Or he perfectly understands what they meant but chose to create artificial outrage. "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity" has not aged well in 2026

Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

#117
post #51
post #40

[flagged]

I read the tweet twice and I don’t see any mention of free speech. What he’s describing, when you look past the rhetoric, sounds ridiculous: a single medium sized country is demanding power to institute global blocks of content on the internet? If that’s an accurate description, that’s deeply concerning for the long term viability of the internet.

seems perfectly reasonable for a country of any size to exercise this sort of power within their own borders

the US constitution doesn't apply worldwide

if Petulant Prince doesn't like it: he can leave

Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

#118

[flagged]

Italy is much more powerful than Cloudflare is. The only sensible thing for him to do is to rush to who will protect him. If the Italian authorities would protect him from capricious use of DNS blocking requests from La Liga or Serie A or whoever he would rather go there but they won’t. It’s an old story. You make a guy’s life hard and the next thing you know he’s working with your enemies even though he’d rather be…

Other people run to their lawyers, and he runs to Musk and Vance.
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