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Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

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Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

#81

"EU shadow cabal" funny considering that he then mentions running for help to US politicians.

If there were an EU shadow cabal who exactly would you run to help for?

When Bonasera’s daughter is assaulted and the perpetrators released, he goes to Don Corleone. That makes sense. It’s not funny or ironic that he turns to criminals to help with criminals.

You need power to counter power.

Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

#82
post #16

censor from the Internet any sites a shadowy cabal of European media elites deemed against their interests Has he recently gone full conspiracy theorist? (Also what's that cringy chatgpt picture supposed to tell us?) Who is the shadowy cabal of EU elites? If anything EU is purely politicians obedient to USA interests. I'm guessing this is what happens in tech when the tide starts to shift, because tech doesn't have m…

He is partially right. The Atlanticist faction in both the US and Europe has been working to get the internet under control since 2016. This project started as a backlash to the Trump election and moved into high gear with COVID and Ukraine. This faction has a sincere belief that the prior openness of the internet is a threat to the international order, as it prevents authorities from shaping civilian perceptions and behavior.

The battlefield has become more complex since 2016, as the old international order is pretty much dead now, so you have competing factions of Atlanticists (US rump admin/UK/FR/DE/Brussels) versus nationalists (US/Israel/Eastern Europe) who both want control of the internet, but through different means and for different reasons. You could also tack on BRICS nations who decided that the best path is to wall themselves off from the open internet.

Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

#85
post #74
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also wonder why he felt emboldened to escalate like this. Maybe he thinks Italy is so small it can be slapped around by a rage post on Twitter? There's a DNS blocklist from media industry applied by German ISPs and I assume Cloudflare was also asked to block these websites, so why didn't I read a story about Cloudflare making a big stir about the German DNS blocking?

If the German filters only apply to ISPs in Germany, they have no effect on users in foreign countries. Moreover, Cloudflare is obviously not an ISP.

Do you think the Italian bureaucrats really want to ban something in France or Germany?

The Cloudflare CEO is clearly misinterpreting something that was lost in translation, which is the bureaucrats stating "Cloudflare must prevent access to XY from everywhere". For bureaucrats "everywhere" means "in my jurisdiction". I cannot believe that the Cloudflare CEO is trying to nitpick around a single word that he so clearly misinterprets.

Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

#86
post #3

I don’t know the backstory but Cloudflare arguing for an open internet is super ironic, presumably he means they want the be the one to close it off and are upset that someone else is ruining their monopoly on it.

So you think it's fine that if some Italian agency orders Cloudflare to block some domain on it's 1.1.1.1 public DNS (or Google on it's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) it should be blocked for everyone on Earth who is using this DNS server, including yourself? And if you think otherwise, you are merely "upset that someone else is ruining their monopoly on it"?

Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

#87
post #51
post #40

[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.

> And in this case @ElonMusk is right: #FreeSpeech is critical and under attack from an out-of-touch cabal of very disturbed European policy makers.

Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Don't worry, this time it's the Social Democrats who ban books, it's _totally_ different.

Most western countries who care about IP have banned piracy. I'm not anti piracy but it's silly to compare.

Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

#90
The interesting part is that neither the AGCOM nor Cloudflare quite understand how each other really work. Also they both believe they got more leeway than they truly have.

AGCOM is an institutional apparatus, they operate separately, but not independently, from whatever leftwing or rightwing government in charge for the most part (past Berlusconian interests aside) and everything they do is entirely subject to not getting out of the guidelines imposed by the EU, no matter what they want anyone else to believe.

Frankly the best course of action for Cloudflare would be getting in touch with the Board of European Regulation pointing them out that AGCOM is, probably for the hundreth time I guess, overstepping their authority. And they should stop right there, otherwise they're the ones that will be actually fined.

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