431–440 of 1001 posts
It's fine to defend your profits but don't pretend you defend anything else.
The appeal to JD Vance is properly craven and validates the view that their business model is effectively a protection racket. Recall the unsavoury episode with taviso, when they lobbied the FTC to investigate him after he helped clean up their mess during Cloudbleed. They always pivot to aggression when challenged.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Western Europe is not an authoritarian dystopia by any measure People are locked up in the Germany and the UK because they criticize the government, its politicians or their policies. I live in Germany.
I live in the UK. This has not happened here
[1]: https://evrimagaci.org/gpt/london-braces-for-free-speech-sho...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a big difference between right to free speech by citizens of a certain country vs. someone working in the military propaganda unit of a foreign country who artificially amplifies their opinion thousandfold while masquerading as a citizen of the victim country with ultimate goal to harm the victim country.
You are focusing on identity and intent, e.g you are defending the restriction of speech based on who is speaking and why . Knowing the difference between an opinion of an origin you consider valid and one you consider invalid is difficult enough that one can abuse that justification to censor "real" speech by citizens.
The distinction isn't about "valid" vs "invalid" opinions, as you framed it, it's just about authenticity and coordination. A Russian citizen genuinely expressing pro Kremlin views on their personal account is exercising speech. A state funded operation running hundreds of fake accounts pretending to be American citizens, artificially amplifying divisive content, is something different, it's basically a form of information warfare.
And what I write here isn't theoretical, coordinated influence operations have inflamed ethnic tensions from the Balkans to Myanmar, not to mention Russian-Ukraininan conflict propaganda. These aren't just "opinions we disagree with", they're documented operations with measurable effects on real world violence. I mean this is a form of war, in which some countries want to destroy your society fabric for their advantage.
Every democracy already makes this distinction in other domains. Foreign governments can't donate to political campaigns. Foreign agents must register when lobbying. Do you call them violations of free speech? They're just acknowledgments that coordinated foreign influence is fundamentally different from citizen discourse.
The difficulty of drawing lines doesn't mean no lines exist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is taking place in a larger geopolitical context. He is applying whatever pressure that Cloudflare can apply on its own (not much), and he mentions Vance as a way to call for US administration help at a time when the US is entering an open economic conflict with Europe. Tech and speech regulation is a central feature of that conflict. IMHO this is a time when there are no good players. I support CF’s fight to ke…
Wasn't 1.1.1.1 explicitly created to help people in countries with government internet restrictions to get around them? 100% support whatever Cloudflare has to do to win this fight. IMO the timing of something like this in the middle of the Elon + X vs UK censorship fight with the current administration providing support is probably the best case scenario. People aren't going to want to hear that, but in this case it…
No, it was explicitly created to receive and study the stream of "garbage traffic" being sent to 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1, which were previously held by APNIC and donated to Cloudflare on this basis. https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/
> APNIC's research group held the IP addresses 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. While the addresses were valid, so many people had entered them into various random systems that they were continuously overwhelmed by a flood of garbage traffic. APNIC wanted to study this garbage traffic but any time they'd tried to announce the IPs, the flood would overwhelm any conventional network.
> We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. We offered Cloudflare's network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.
Not a good look on that guy to list his "pro-bono" services and threaten to pull them while asking JD Vance for his help. How is he expecting the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics to influence some representative of media right holders who have fined Cloudflare? Is he assuming that just because all of the listed things are Italian they can just make the fine go away?
This is taking place in a larger geopolitical context. He is applying whatever pressure that Cloudflare can apply on its own (not much), and he mentions Vance as a way to call for US administration help at a time when the US is entering an open economic conflict with Europe. Tech and speech regulation is a central feature of that conflict. IMHO this is a time when there are no good players. I support CF’s fight to ke…
A person praising Vance and Musk obviously doesn't value due process, judicial oversight and ultimately decency.
Also that paragraph is very critical as far as praise goes.
Not a good look on that guy to list his "pro-bono" services and threaten to pull them while asking JD Vance for his help. How is he expecting the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics to influence some representative of media right holders who have fined Cloudflare? Is he assuming that just because all of the listed things are Italian they can just make the fine go away?
I'm a team lead in an American organization that relies heavily on Cloudflare's Project Galileo[1], and I read that post with growing dread. My first thought was that this guy doesn't sound very much like a CEO. Let me rephrase that: He sounds like the kind of unhinged CEO of orgs I try to stay away from (X, for instance). Then I read what you're talking about: > [...] we are considering the following actions: [...]…
Not a good look on that guy to list his "pro-bono" services and threaten to pull them while asking JD Vance for his help. How is he expecting the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics to influence some representative of media right holders who have fined Cloudflare? Is he assuming that just because all of the listed things are Italian they can just make the fine go away?
He replies to an Italian user > We can’t offer free services in a country that fines us millions unreasonably. Fix your government or lose access to our charity. On one hand, I agree with you, it's problematic to threaten collective punishment. However, I don't think it's unreasonable to "divest" from a country trying to fine you for behavior outside of said country. It's also important to communicate that clearly, a…
> We can’t offer free services in a country that fines us millions unreasonably.
This is normal and reasonable.
> Fix your government or lose access to our charity.
This is petulant and smug.
My suggestion for what they could have done differently is have a PR team handle the public announcements.
TBF what they did here is probably more effective than my plan, but only because the world is a trash fire.