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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

#171

Post by dingnuts »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #152
pfortuny wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mmmmhhhhh… There is the problem of the middleman (the telcos): you are using them for communication. I guess if the USPS/Fedex knew for a fact (such as your website request) that you were communicating CP, the. they should do something about it? This is an honest question.

> I guess if the USPS/Fedex knew for a fact (such as your website request) that you were communicating CP, the. they should do something about it? That is often the case, but it's also not the relevant part, because consider what happens if you do that. I mean it's the same thing that happens with parcel carriers -- everybody's package ends up in an opaque brown box and the carrier has no means to determine if it's c…

> Should they be obligated to open and censor your mail?

they are. they're not obligated to go through every package but they are absolutely obligated to turn over packages to law enforcement, and they do, and law enforcement will one hundred percent open and go through your mail. and if they find something you shouldn't have they will dress up as a mail carrier to deliver it to you and then detain you!

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make exactly but this is a losing battle

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

#172

Post by AnthonyMouse »

vkou wrote: post #168
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if you block it from collecting revenue How is this not a trade barrier against foreign payment providers?

If it's nation-of-origin-agnostic (All vendors, domestic or foreign have to follow the same rules, and the foreigners have chosen to not follow those rules, and are being sanctioned for it), it's not a trade barrier. It's just a foreign company being upset that it isn't getting special treatment that would allow it to operate with an illegal advantage over local vendors.

Is that what it is though? It seems weird that such an overwhelming majority of US retail banking customers are using a domestic institution if the foreign ones are getting a fair shake, doesn't it?

Countries do a thing where they call something "neutral rules" while crafting them such that only the domestic incumbents can satisfy them or they can be selectively enforced against anyone the regulators don't like or who actually does or is deemed likely to refuse to comply with extralegal requests that the law doesn't or couldn't require. The US financial regulators do exactly that and you can see it in the outcomes.

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

#173

Post by nkrisc »

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 content can be delivered over the internet, then content can also not be delivered over the internet. The only question is how surgical the ban hammer is.

Some countries simply disconnect themselves from the global internet on occasion to prevent content from being delivered.

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

#174

Post by exasperaited »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #157
exasperaited wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quite close to the whole Nazi bar analogy isn't it? You run a bar. You let anyone in, and some of your customers are a bit edgy. But one day, Nazis start using your bar for their regular gathering and you don't kick them out. Congratulations: now you have a Nazi bar.

An obvious problem with this analogy is that the percentage of Cloudflare's traffic which could be Nazis even if they were hosting all the Nazis in the world would still start with a 0 followed by a decimal point.

The analogy is not about Cloudflare but about the hosting provider Cloudflare is blocking.

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

#175

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dingnuts wrote: post #171
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess if the USPS/Fedex knew for a fact (such as your website request) that you were communicating CP, the. they should do something about it? That is often the case, but it's also not the relevant part, because consider what happens if you do that. I mean it's the same thing that happens with parcel carriers -- everybody's package ends up in an opaque brown box and the carrier has no means to determine if it's c…

> Should they be obligated to open and censor your mail? they are. they're not obligated to go through every package but they are absolutely obligated to turn over packages to law enforcement, and they do, and law enforcement will one hundred percent open and go through your mail. and if they find something you shouldn't have they will dress up as a mail carrier to deliver it to you and then detain you! I'm not sure…

If the government wants to read your mail, they need a warrant. And then it's the government doing it, not a private company, and you have a right to a trial and to see the evidence presented against you etc. etc., which is why it shouldn't be put on a private company who isn't going to do any of that.

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

#176

Post by recursive »

iamnothere wrote: post #135
remarkEon wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Zero control is an exaggeration—the worst lawbreakers still face justice under the current system, and that seems ok. Doesn’t scale.

Doesn’t need to. The optimum amount of lawbreaking is non-zero. As long as we are catching the worst criminals and creating reasonable incentives to avoid crime, we are doing enough. Some amount of lawbreaking is to be expected in a free society; it’s literally the price of freedom.

> The optimum amount of lawbreaking is non-zero

This is a new idea for me. How is optimality measured here? Aggregate utility for society? What's the independent variable? Is this from the perspective of law-makers? If I was on a desert island, should I do some crime to ensure optimality?

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

#177

Post by AnthonyMouse »

exasperaited wrote: post #174
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An obvious problem with this analogy is that the percentage of Cloudflare's traffic which could be Nazis even if they were hosting all the Nazis in the world would still start with a 0 followed by a decimal point.

The analogy is not about Cloudflare but about the hosting provider Cloudflare is blocking.

There is no threat of any particular service being overrun with any particular ideology. That isn't how this works. If the same host is hosting the websites of both Israeli and Muslim groups, neither of them would even be aware of the other being on the same servers unless somebody told them.

Moreover, Cloudflare is the CDN being blocked by foreign ISPs because their laws require ISPs to do blocking on the basis of IP address even though Cloudflare's IP addresses are shared by huge numbers of other customers. It's effectively an attempt to punish international companies for having customers who do something which is illegal in one country even if it's legal in their own country, e.g. some content is in the public domain in one country but not another. It's an attempt to apply one country's laws to another country.

Which is a trade barrier because it prevents a company from serving the customers in both jurisdictions, creating a preference for domestic companies that don't operate in the jurisdictions with less restrictive laws.

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

#178

Post by asdff »

pjc50 wrote: post #85
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.

> Infrastructure for blocking websites simply shouldn't exist. I think people have forgotten how extreme a position this is: the idea that once something is on the internet, national law simply ceases to apply and governments should have absolutely zero control over obscene material, IP infringment, harassment, libel, foreign propaganda, money laundering, fraudulent financial services, gambling, and so on - simply be…

It is kind of stupid when you think about what this stuff fundamentally is: digital files on someone's computer that you connected to. The analog, well, analog would be if the FBI had cctv into everyone's bookshelf and desk drawer. Some real Orwellian thought policing we hand wave away because the nature of the technology makes such surveillance logistically trivial in comparison.

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

#179

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#180

Post by asdff »

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…

This discounts the effects of things like shills (commercial or government) or propaganda in general and its quieting effect on discussion. Yes, there are conspiracy theories, but there is a reason why they end up relegated to the quacks and aren't broached upon at all, save for in jest perhaps, by mainstream sources of information. I mean really consider the actual diversity of thought among mainstream sources in this country. It is astoundingly limited and entirely biased towards neoliberalism. Our political spectrum is extremely narrow and differentiated by only a small handful of hobby horse issues.
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