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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

#21

Post by AdrianB1 »

miohtama wrote: post #11
djoldman wrote: 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…

The EU companies make payments to Cloudflare, and these could be confiscated. Also any staff in Italy is in danger.

The question clearly stated the assumption that there is no staff in Italy. Also the payments cannot be confiscated unless they are made to Italian banks, which makes no sense if they don't have a branch there, so if the payments are made to US, there is no way to confiscate by the Italian authorities.

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

#22

Post by AdrianB1 »

bakugo wrote: post #15
djoldman wrote: 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…

Unfortunately, even if we ignore the fact that Cloudflare probably has many Italian customers, there are other ways they can interfere with Cloudflare's services, such as by blocking their IP addresses in the country. It wouldn't be the first time this has been done by European ISPs, sadly.

Is that a problem for Cloudflare or with Italy? In the end, can Italy break Internet or can Internet cut off Italy? It is a theoretical question, I wonder how much control countries can have over a non-country level concept as Internet. The jurisdiction question is very much the point, does Cloudflare or Google provide a paid DNS service to Italian clients and the contract is regulated by Italian laws or it is a universal and free DNS service that Italy cannot regulate?

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

#23

Post by bakugo »

delroth wrote: post #16
bakugo wrote: post #8

> The goal is aimed at preventing illegal football streams It's impressive how much internet censorship in Europe is currently being caused by this one group of extremely greedy people. It's one of the rare cases where the sheer size and international influence of companies like Google and Cloudflare can actually do some good for the world by fighting back against such laws.

> 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 in real time with TV/movie streaming services: If you simply tell users "Pay us this single, simple and affordable fee every month and we will provide you with unrestricted access to the content you want, whenever you want", the users will come. But then the investors come knocking. It's not enough that you made N money last quarter, you have to make N+1 next quater. The line has to go up. So the subscription prices go up, the number of subscriptions required to access everything goes up, you start getting ads even though your subscription was originally ad-free, and suddenly the service doesn't seem so appealing anymore.

I've heard endless stories of people having to pay for multiple subscriptions just to watch all of their favorite team's games, and still missing out on some due to whatever new money-making scheme sports companies came up with this month. It's not hard to see why so many people resort to just going online and finding a pirate stream.

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

#24

Post by AdrianB1 »

delroth wrote: post #16
bakugo wrote: post #8

> The goal is aimed at preventing illegal football streams It's impressive how much internet censorship in Europe is currently being caused by this one group of extremely greedy people. It's one of the rare cases where the sheer size and international influence of companies like Google and Cloudflare can actually do some good for the world by fighting back against such laws.

> 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…

So basically the problem is reduced to "how can Italy fight against a crime happening somewhere in Russia or Ukraine"? Imagine there is a TV broadcast from Russia, how can Italy forbid it? They can definitely disrupt it (by electronic jamming), but not forbit it. Similar to Internet, the difference is the medium of transmission, not the facts of the matter.

In Communist times in my country I was watching cartoons broadcasted from the neighboring country. Adults were watching adult content at night from the same source. There was no way to stop that.

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

#25

Post by nukem222 »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #21
miohtama wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU companies make payments to Cloudflare, and these could be confiscated. Also any staff in Italy is in danger.

The question clearly stated the assumption that there is no staff in Italy. Also the payments cannot be confiscated unless they are made to Italian banks, which makes no sense if they don't have a branch there, so if the payments are made to US, there is no way to confiscate by the Italian authorities.

Presumably italian courts could seize payments made by italian clients of cloudflare, yes? Even if the account is located well outside of italy, the owners can be compelled by legal means.

(To some degree of effectiveness, to be sure. But I have a hard time imagining there are no clients registered in italy at all.)

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

#26

Post by AdrianB1 »

nukem222 wrote: post #25
AdrianB1 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question clearly stated the assumption that there is no staff in Italy. Also the payments cannot be confiscated unless they are made to Italian banks, which makes no sense if they don't have a branch there, so if the payments are made to US, there is no way to confiscate by the Italian authorities.

Presumably italian courts could seize payments made by italian clients of cloudflare, yes? Even if the account is located well outside of italy, the owners can be compelled by legal means. (To some degree of effectiveness, to be sure. But I have a hard time imagining there are no clients registered in italy at all.)

The payment is done, money is at Cloudflare in a US bank, Cloudflare takes it and move it somewhere else. How do they seize it? The money is gone and it's not coming back.

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

#27

Post by xxmarkuski »

geoffpado wrote: post #6
Kenji wrote: post #2

DOH is your friend. My regime poisons DNS and enabling DOH makes things accessible again.

Serious question: how is DoH supposed to help when the resolver itself is being asked to return bad results? DoH makes sense if something is MITM-ing your DNS requests, but it sounds in this case that Google is being asked to just straight-up return bad results?

DNSSEC is the actual solution, providing authenticity and integrity for DNS records. The DNS client can verify that the received DNS response is what the zone admin intended. Additional records (NSEC / NSEC3) are used to provide a proof of non-existence, preventing suppression from a mitm attacker. But if your government is mitming you, you don't want them to see you use DNSSEC. DoH is useful in that case, because a mitm sees only https traffic, which is less suspicious than DoT.

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

#28

Post by nukem222 »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #26
nukem222 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably italian courts could seize payments made by italian clients of cloudflare, yes? Even if the account is located well outside of italy, the owners can be compelled by legal means. (To some degree of effectiveness, to be sure. But I have a hard time imagining there are no clients registered in italy at all.)

The payment is done, money is at Cloudflare in a US bank, Cloudflare takes it and move it somewhere else. How do they seize it? The money is gone and it's not coming back.

Assuming the client is an italian company, as would make sense in this thread, they would issue a court order compelling the corporation to comply with domestic law or get fined (or worse, idk, this is all speculative). Presumably the ask would be handing over control of the client's bank account for the needs of the court fulfilling its duties moving forward from the court order.

Edit: corrected mistake about whose account would be within the court's grasp.

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

#29

Post by Kenji »

geoffpado wrote: post #6
Kenji wrote: post #2

DOH is your friend. My regime poisons DNS and enabling DOH makes things accessible again.

Serious question: how is DoH supposed to help when the resolver itself is being asked to return bad results? DoH makes sense if something is MITM-ing your DNS requests, but it sounds in this case that Google is being asked to just straight-up return bad results?

DNS is usually poisoned at the ISP level. ISPs provide DNS for the customers. DoH helps in two ways: You choose a different DNS resolver and it's over HTTPS so you don't have any goons meddling with it.

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

#30

Post by rvnx »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #26
nukem222 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably italian courts could seize payments made by italian clients of cloudflare, yes? Even if the account is located well outside of italy, the owners can be compelled by legal means. (To some degree of effectiveness, to be sure. But I have a hard time imagining there are no clients registered in italy at all.)

The payment is done, money is at Cloudflare in a US bank, Cloudflare takes it and move it somewhere else. How do they seize it? The money is gone and it's not coming back.

It's more simple, imagine Cloudflare is used to show pedophile content, and refuses to remove it. Then the solution is to cut access to Cloudflare.

That's the logic here. It's not about whether they have offices or not, but whether they are distributing content to users in Italy.

There is always a local relay or ISP in Italy that offers access to Cloudflare, and this relay can be coerced into blocking Cloudflare.

Of course 1% of people may be able to access otherwise (for example, via Starlink or VPNs), but the objective is to block 90%+ of the traffic, so Cloudflare reconsiders following local laws.

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