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Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law

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Re: Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law

#101
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CF blocking a whole country like this would be interesting... basically half the internet would stop working, probably a bunch of italian government stuff too, and people would hopefully blame the government, because i'm pretty sure there are almost zero italian voters who wanted this from their representatives. Sadly, companies bow down instead of just risk it once.

Are you suggesting that it is a good thing for corporations to be more powerful than governments?

When the government is acting badly, yeah

Re: Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law

#102
post #7

> This decision follows a similar case against Internet backbone firm Cloudflare. In January, the Court of Milan found that Cloudflare's CDN, DNS server, and WARP VPN were facilitating piracy. The court threatened Cloudflare with fines of up to 10,000 euros per day if it did not begin blocking the sites. I'm always curious about jurisdiction on this stuff. If Cloudflare had no physical machines, employees, and proper…

That is a big 'if' though. Don't CDNs work by having equipment in every country so you don't have to?

They can peer with large local providers / exchanges and rent some of their local storage capacity without owning that equipment, and without having corporate presence in Italy. (You don't have to be German to rent a Hetzner server, do you?)

Re: Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law

#103
post #23
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's impressive how much internet censorship in Europe is currently being caused by this one group of extremely greedy people. How is this greedy? It's clearly illegal behavior, both from illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those re-broadcast services aren't even free either, they're directly making money from the broadcasts they're replicating. The problem is that we still haven't figured out a way to…

> How is this greedy? It's clearly illegal behavior, both from illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those re-broadcast services aren't even free either, they're directly making money from the broadcasts they're replicating. Because piracy is a service problem. Pirate streaming sites attract users because they provide a better, more convenient service than the paid options. We've recently seen this happen i…

From the revenue extraction POV, the optimum price is such that user is unhappy to pay it, but is still paying, while raising the price even by a small amount would convince the user to cancel the service.

This means that the companies are constantly testing this edge, and check whether too many subscribers start to fall off the edge when the price rises.

Re: Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law

#104
post #7

> This decision follows a similar case against Internet backbone firm Cloudflare. In January, the Court of Milan found that Cloudflare's CDN, DNS server, and WARP VPN were facilitating piracy. The court threatened Cloudflare with fines of up to 10,000 euros per day if it did not begin blocking the sites. I'm always curious about jurisdiction on this stuff. If Cloudflare had no physical machines, employees, and proper…

I'm not sure how there's any ambiguity to this? We're talking about the EU here. The same laws that enable you to do business across borders without having a legal presence in every country also outline how to deal with issues like these.

They need to say "fuck off, then, enjoy EuropeNet" and ignore their demands. There should be zero ambiguity and zero compliance. The internet doesn't work if arbitrary restrictions on speech get imposed. You cannot give a single goddamn inch or they will claw miles away, insidiously inserting their ever growing list of forbidden things.

Re: Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law

#105
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CF blocking a whole country like this would be interesting... basically half the internet would stop working, probably a bunch of italian government stuff too, and people would hopefully blame the government, because i'm pretty sure there are almost zero italian voters who wanted this from their representatives. Sadly, companies bow down instead of just risk it once.

Are you suggesting that it is a good thing for corporations to be more powerful than governments?

Yes, it is a good thing governments do not have absolute authority over whatever they decide and have to follow laws protecting the rights of people who own corporations, like not having to censor one set of people because another set of people paid a lot of money so they can continue exploiting the public with outrageous licensing laws.

The correct response to piracy is to make your content more conveniently available to more people, so it's easier to get it through an authorized channel than through piracy. The people doing the sales want to arbitrarily pick and choose, imposing artificial scarcity, hoarding massive collections of copyright licenses, and exploit markets with outrageously inflated prices that only ever enrich the lawyers and centralized rights-holders groups, and somehow rarely ever enrich the people who create the media. And because that money gets pooled by lawyers and corrupt do-nothings, they spend huge amounts on propaganda and outright corruption of politicians to push laws like this.

Re: Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law

#106
post #76

Is all that folks "Why is Europe like that" from US? In that case, remember that TikTok is going to be banned because it is destroying US social networks business. On the contrary, this is an official order after the proof of copyright infringement, and targets the specific devices that are attached by people here in Italy on their TVs to stoke content (pezzotto). It's not single people that go watch some streaming,…

Banning TikTok from the U.S. is really just banning them engaging in financial transactions in the U.S. Asking Google or whoever to poison DNS in a country is a whole different technical ball of wax. The two are not comparable. One difference is that ByteDance won't attempt to engage in financial transactions in the U.S. because doing so would create a diplomatic crisis and anyways it's not easy for a company of that size and with that much business to evade sanctions like that. While the pirate will and can just due to their small size and their ability to set up new bank accounts, which is why countries try to block pirates in the network rather than in the financial system, but blocking them in the network is pretty difficult, and blocking them in DNS -DNSSEC be damned- is basically the easiest way.

Re: Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To some extent it is decentralized is it not? Other than a small list of who serves which TLD you should be able to find the canonical nameserver for any domain. It should be more normal for people to have a DNS running locally perhaps.

> To some extent it is decentralized is it not? No. Everything relies on the root servers, as recursive servers rely on them.

But you can run your own root servers.

Re: Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law

#108

If there is ONE thing that needs to be decentralized RTFN, it is DNS. It's taking time, but the thugs in charge in various countries are slowly coming to realize that the easiest place to apply censorship is DNS because of its antiquated design and pervasiveness. One: you should be able to freely choose or name-to-IP-translation provider. Two: modern DNS should run on top of a trustless blockchain infrastructure. Nam…

We all want the same view of the Internet and the Domain Name System, do we not?

If so then that entails centralized registries and registrars.

Perhaps what you have in mind is that the registries should be published, including incremental updates, "on a blockchain" so that we can all run our own authoritative DNS root, TLD, and ccTLD servers. You don't need a blockchain for this unless you want people to be able to register domainnames without registrars to mediate the registrations.

Disintermediation of domainname registration might be a worthy goal, and it would help people run their own servers if it meant that registries were public (i.e., iterable, including ownership metadata). But you know that's going to be hard for governments to accept that insist on knowing who the domainname owners/operators are. But you don't need this in order to be able to run your own DNS authoritatives to avoid censorship: if they are public (available for download) just download the various TLD zones and serve them to your devices!

Or, if you don't care for us all to have the same view of the Internet, then.. well, I don't think that would be a good thing. You might send me a link that I can't resolve unless you tell me what DNS you're using so I can switch to it, but switching to it might break other things -- in the worst case you we might not even be able to communicate which DNSes to use in order be able to communicate! That would be terrible. So on the whole IMO we just have to have a centralized DNS and we can only hope to defeat the DNS censors by sidestepping the operators' servers that the censors will rely on -- you might as well just use a VPN.

Oh, and of course you know that nation states won't allow operating systems to have DNS censorship bypass functionality pre-installed, so most users won't know how to do it and won't do it.

Re: Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law

#109
post #54

Why is Europe like this? I feel like this is what happens when you have a region that can't innovate and only knows how to regulate. Innovators cease to be represented at the government level and the general public equates regulation with safety. The result is an increasing amount of absurd policymaking related to technology.

I assume you're in where this doesn't happen [yet].

Re: Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law

#110
post #23
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's impressive how much internet censorship in Europe is currently being caused by this one group of extremely greedy people. How is this greedy? It's clearly illegal behavior, both from illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those re-broadcast services aren't even free either, they're directly making money from the broadcasts they're replicating. The problem is that we still haven't figured out a way to…

> How is this greedy? It's clearly illegal behavior, both from illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those re-broadcast services aren't even free either, they're directly making money from the broadcasts they're replicating. Because piracy is a service problem. Pirate streaming sites attract users because they provide a better, more convenient service than the paid options. We've recently seen this happen i…

>Pirate streaming sites attract users because they provide a better, more convenient service than the paid options.

Pirate streaming sites attract users because they are cheaper. People are using them because they can’t or won’t pay.

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