The Italian 'piracy shield' is indeed reprehensible, but the tweet is very far out there as well. For all I care Cloudflare blocks the entirety of Europe for a week or so in protest, but aligning yourself with the bunch of fascists now in charge of the US government and prefacing that with "while there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration" is pretty insane as Cloudflare will be at the complete mercy of their lawlessness, if not now, then in the future.
Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
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Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#372> To effectively tackle live sports piracy,
Of course it's about football/calcio. I love Italy and almost everything related to Italy (I'm a Juventus fan to boot), but in this the Italian officials are way out of their element and behind the times.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#373As a side note: just today Polish president veto'ed a law that would allow similar government power.
The government coalition instantly turned on "think of the children" rhetoric in response. I think they are misreading the public sentiment on this one though.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#374Wow! That's an appalling image to finish with. How could you possibly think that was good?
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this similar to what happened in Spain?
yes, it's quite similar. They blocked some lawful services too such as google drive (yes, really) and a TON of sites behind cloudflare by blocking some of its IPs (it happened a while ago, it's not directly related to this).
It's in a way related because this is also meant to combat "football streaming piracy", the same as in Spain. Idiot moves.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#376I'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.
> BTW, before I read this Xweet I was a Cloudflare fan.
The CEO of a US tech company asking the Vice President for help with censorship caused you to immediately flip you opinion? And not only flip your opinion, but practically embrace complete censorship of the internet if that means Cloudflare leaving Europe?
..yikes.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because they only violated the "law" in a local market (Italy) .
And the correct response to that is to write up a threat towards the entire population of a country?
What else could they do? The government represent the country. If their business model is not welcome there then they withdraw. It's very fair to say "if you insist on those rules I choose not to play". They owe Italy nothing.
Btw, I recently "threatened" Switzerland to withdraw my business from there because the cost of doing business there (complying with their VAT regulation) is higher than my revenue from there (maybe 1-2 licenses a year). The whole Switzerland will not be able to buy my software because of that. I didn't think of posting about it on Twitter though.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, the fine amounts to over 200% of Italy-sourced revenue ($17 million fine vs. $8 million in revenue in 2024). Why would you continue doing business in Italy?
They are a conglomerate and per Matthews words "an internet infrastructure provider". Why does the local revenue matter when they are serving a global market? EDIT: And fwiw, "Why would you continue doing business in Italy?" is not what is being proposed. They are threatening to block 55 million people from ~20% of the world wide web.
They're threatening to remove servers from Italy. They're explicitly NOT threatening to block Italians from being able to access sites through Cloudflare.
I have my fair share of problems with CF, but I assume here that they're threatening higher latency (i.e. requests from Italian users would have to go to a neighboring country to be routed) rather than blocking.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No, I'm not taking lessons in democracy from JD Vance, thank you very much You are falling into a trap where you can not recognize a true point because it is made by someone you disagree with. I don't condone Vance or the Trump admin. He is right about European governemnt's attacks on free speech.
you are falling into the trap of ignoring the pandering. cloudflare bro is clearly pandering here and showing that, in the moment, he will say/do whatever to whomever to get what he wants. cloudflare kind of has a history of doing this. there was zero reason to name drop vance and elon besides appealing to their rabid fans to bolster support. it's just more hypocrisy.
What other option do they have? It’s either comply with unjust rulings that undermine the free internet (and their business) or make a deal with the devil. Either one is bad but only complying has an immediate negative impact.
If there was any sense that this ruling was just a temporary mistake that will be corrected by pending regulation/legislation, then a third option would be on the table: temporarily comply and wait it out. But all indications are that the EU is hell-bent on making things worse, not better, for the open internet.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#380[flagged]