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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

#191

Post by loeg »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #155
loeg wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US already deputizes third parties to enforce its laws. Banks are responsible for KYC / AML. Grocery stores must check ID when selling alcohol. This is nothing special.

It's accurate that the US already does it, but that doesn't tell you if we should be doing it. It does, however, provide evidence that doing that is dumb. KYC/AML have an effectiveness that rounds to zero while causing trouble for innocent people as the government pressures the banks to do something about problems the banks aren't in a position to actually solve, so instead the banks suspend the accounts of more inno…

> KYC/AML have an effectiveness that rounds to zero

That's factually inaccurate.

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

#192

Post by antonvs »

ineedasername wrote: post #57
antonvs wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's funny that as soon as anything European (not even related to EU one bit) Living in the US, I've noticed many Americans don't really make distinctions like that. They see "EU" as a kind of shorthand for "Europe", or something along those lines. Even the fact that the UK is no longer in the EU doesn't affect this - it's still part of what Americans think of as "the EU".

Probably because most adults in the US grew up and were educated at a time when the EU was, comparative to today, insignificant in # of countries, population, GDP, and general importance, and so very little talked about in either news or text books compared to Europe as an economic and political block. And since Europe was abbreviated 'Eur' well, easy to see how dropping the 'r' hasn't resulted in universal US intuit…

That's a lot of justification for what ultimately just amounts to ignorance of the outside world.

It's certainly not the case that "most adults in the US grew up and were educated at a time..." The EU exceeded $3 trillion in GDP by 1980. The original EU countries included Germany, France, and Italy, so were hardly insignificant.

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

#193

Post by rjdj377dhabsn »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #104
immibis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody's saying the government shouldn't be able to go after the owner of the site and force them to shut it down. It definitely shouldn't be done by third parties though.

How does the US government, force a Russian website, hosted in Russia, for Russian people, following Russian laws, to shut down?

They shouldn't.

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

#194

Post by rjdj377dhabsn »

embedding-shape wrote: post #69
Taek wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> I thought "America" was "the USA"

It is, at least that's the most common definition.

If you want to refer to North and South America together, one generally says "the Americas".

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

#196

Post by sammy2255 »

stego-tech wrote: post #129
sammy2255 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't. And actually, quite hilariously, Somalian pirates raided the Kenyan data center that Cloudflare have their Kenyan PoP in (7 years ago). https://old.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/comments/837c4c/somalian...

I had missed this and find it deeply hilarious that actual meatspace pirates raided a company’s datacenter that protects digital pirates. Also, just for folks seemingly confused by my words in the original post: I got no beef with digital piracy myself, just more pointing out that if your company is willfully protecting hate speech (like Nazis) and piracy sites, well, you’re courting a very specific kind of response…

Yeah it's not true. It was a joke /r/woosh

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

#197

Post by vintermann »

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…

I notice foreign propaganda has sneaked in there. It wouldn't have been there 20 years ago. Then defending site blocking with the need to stop foreign propaganda would be seen as a huge self-goal.

People might even have assumed it was sarcastic, and that you didn't actually want site blocking, if you defended it that way.

I think people have forgotten how extreme that position used to be.

(Money laundering and anything involving payment and debts are also independent of site blocking - it's neither sufficient or necessary to block sites to do that.

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

#198

Post by vintermann »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #104
immibis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody's saying the government shouldn't be able to go after the owner of the site and force them to shut it down. It definitely shouldn't be done by third parties though.

How does the US government, force a Russian website, hosted in Russia, for Russian people, following Russian laws, to shut down?

It shouldn't be able to, clearly. Not any more than Russia should be able to shut down a US website, hosted in the US, for US people, following US laws.

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

#199

Post by vintermann »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #84
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. Isn't that exactly what Cloudflare is, in part? They happily block "malicious" traffic

You're confusing censorship with moderation.

Moderation is when you block information from me, because I don't want to see that information.

Censorship is when you block information from me, because you don't want me to see that information.

Cloudflare is the former. Or at least, that's what they want to do. Or say that they want to do. If you let someone or something do moderation on your behalf, there's always a good deal of trust involved, that they're not manipulating you by also blocking information you would have wanted to see. Moderation is not a trivial matter. But it's also not censorship.

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

#200

Post by AnthonyMouse »

loeg wrote: post #191
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's accurate that the US already does it, but that doesn't tell you if we should be doing it. It does, however, provide evidence that doing that is dumb. KYC/AML have an effectiveness that rounds to zero while causing trouble for innocent people as the government pressures the banks to do something about problems the banks aren't in a position to actually solve, so instead the banks suspend the accounts of more inno…

> KYC/AML have an effectiveness that rounds to zero That's factually inaccurate.

> That's factually inaccurate.

It isn't:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...

"It finds that the anti-money laundering policy intervention has less than 0.1 percent impact on criminal finances, compliance costs exceed recovered criminal funds more than a hundred times over, and banks, taxpayers and ordinary citizens are penalized more than criminal enterprises."

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