I'm dead against Privacy Shield, but if it gets Cloudflare out of Europe then maybe it was worth it?
BTW, before I read this Xweet I was a Cloudflare fan.
Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
211–220 of 1001 posts
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#212I'm Italian, and as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist, I find hard to empathize with Cloudflare, especially after this tweet. First off, the immediate appeal to Vance and Musk is embarrassing. I believe he knows he's technically in the wrong for not abiding to the law, so gathering the sympathy of the "freedom fighters" of the web is all he can do. But the funniest part about this tweet are the "threats"…
First off, the immediate appeal to Vance and Musk is embarrassing.
It's a very unhinged, very Trumpy response. The repeated use of "cabal" and hyperbole is, as you say, embarrassing.
It's useful to know this is the official voice, tone, and attitude of CloudFlare. Now I know not to recommend it to my company. The owners would not be happy to do business with an organization that has its politics and alignment so close to the surface.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is mentioning Vance and Musk as beacons of democracy and free speech.
[flagged]
Yes, the Administration who is famously so pro Free-Speech, that they intimidate and prosecute senators, when they make a video about "PSA: You can refuse illegal orders"
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#214In case people can’t/don’t want to read something on X, here is the statement: Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined @Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet. The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any sites a shadowy cabal of European media elites deemed agains…
It's not "quasi-judicial". They have no judicial authority, at all, despite how they present themselves.
They can only show them their supposed findings to a ministerial judge and tell them "Weeeh weeh, Cloudflare is being mean".
Then the judge will look at the AGCOM analysis, listen to Cloudflare or an EU representative or whoever may raise an objection to those findings, and then, after a loooooong time, enforce or not the fine.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#215"EU shadow cabal" funny considering that he then mentions running for help to US politicians.
Vance is hardly operating in the shadows. He is a very public figure.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most western countries who care about IP have banned piracy. I'm not anti piracy but it's silly to compare.
Back in the day it was US media companies which started the big war against piracy and for the use of DRM. It was pushed by US media companies and the US government upon Europe. Same as with software patents. It's weird that now US companies complain about local media rights holders doing their censorship thing when the whole thing was started by the US.
I'm not sure, does US not block websites by DNS? Wrt Anna's Archive they've gone as far as revoking its main domain
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#217I'm Italian, and as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist, I find hard to empathize with Cloudflare, especially after this tweet. First off, the immediate appeal to Vance and Musk is embarrassing. I believe he knows he's technically in the wrong for not abiding to the law, so gathering the sympathy of the "freedom fighters" of the web is all he can do. But the funniest part about this tweet are the "threats"…
Cloudflare is clearly in the right. Global censorship from an unaccountable cabal is a moral wrong. There's no sense in which Italy somehow 'wins' here, because even if they win, they lose.
Clearly? Or clearly according to the statement in a Xweet from their CFO?
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#218Italian here. If somebody wants to read the full document about the fine (in italian) it's here: https://www.agcom.it/sites/default/files/provvedimenti/delib... Part of this doc states: ``` The rights holders also declared, under their own responsibility, providing certified documentary evidence of the current nature of the unlawful conduct, that the reported domain names and IP addresses were unequivocally intended…
I just want to point out that AGCOM once decided to put out an "Economically Relevant Instagram Influencers Register". They're not really... let's say, 'on the ball' for understanding how the internet works. It's a bit of a running joke in Italy that their decisions are often anachronistic or completely misunderstanding of the actual technology behind the scenes. And for the most part they just deliberate, they have…
If we truly want to point out the ridiculousness of Italian tech regulations, the influencers' registry, the temporary ChatGPT ban from a few years back or even the new AI regulations cannot hold a candle to the 22-year-old war on... arcade games.
A poorly written regulation from 2003 basically lumped together all gaming machines in a public setting with gambling, resulting in extremely onerous source code and server auditing requirements for any arcade cabinet connected to the internet (the law even goes as far as to specify that the code shall be delivered on CD-ROMs and compile on specific outdated Windows versions) as well as other certification burdens for new offline games and conversions of existing machines. Every Italian arcade has remained more or less frozen in time ever since, with the occasional addition of games modded to state on the title screen that they are a completely different cabinet (such as the infamous "Dance Dance Revolution NAOMI Universal") in an attempt to get around the certification requirements.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#219[flagged]
I read the tweet twice and I don’t see any mention of free speech. What he’s describing, when you look past the rhetoric, sounds ridiculous: a single medium sized country is demanding power to institute global blocks of content on the internet? If that’s an accurate description, that’s deeply concerning for the long term viability of the internet.
Please read the entire tweet. Free speech is mentioned at character number 1779.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens when BunnyCDN finds itself in the same situation?
I suspect they'll follow the law and do what the court says rather than pleading to their feudal masters on twitter and threatening to throw their toys out of the pram
> I suspect they'll follow the law and do what the court says
Which, to me, seems like a clearly worse outcome? I hate the feudal masters more than most on HN, if that somehow matters for the credibility of my own opinion.