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I’d appreciate the person who downvoted this comment explaining why they condone nonconsensual pornography including that of minors.
Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
951–960 of 1001 posts
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#952You may have a point but you lost me citing Vance and Musk.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#953Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we are under daily attack from Russian accounts We would go a long way if our communication platforms weren't intentionally amplifying the most controversial voices for the sake of maximizing ad revenue. Back in the day the Russians needed to spend money to buy influence. Now they can just make their propaganda engaging enough and Western companies will happily host it and promote it for free .
> Now they can just make their propaganda engaging enough and Western companies will happily host it and promote it for free. Important to distinguish here that all of these companies are not just Western but American.
Do we have comparable European companies though?
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#954Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a team lead in an American organization that relies heavily on Cloudflare's Project Galileo[1], and I read that post with growing dread. My first thought was that this guy doesn't sound very much like a CEO. Let me rephrase that: He sounds like the kind of unhinged CEO of orgs I try to stay away from (X, for instance). Then I read what you're talking about: > [...] we are considering the following actions: [...]…
When you fine a company more than the entire revenue they get from your nation, they will pull out. It is not retributive. What is hard to understand about that?
That is an important perspective. I was looking at it from the angle of cloudflare's overall revenue, not their revenue from just Italy. I think if he would have said that in his post it would have been much more powerful.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#955Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a team lead in an American organization that relies heavily on Cloudflare's Project Galileo[1], and I read that post with growing dread. My first thought was that this guy doesn't sound very much like a CEO. Let me rephrase that: He sounds like the kind of unhinged CEO of orgs I try to stay away from (X, for instance). Then I read what you're talking about: > [...] we are considering the following actions: [...]…
> If my state had a similar spat with Cloudflare would we be in danger of losing the infrastructure we've grown to depend on? Absolutely. And if any of their competitors claims they can guarantee that they won't ever (have to) pull out somewhere for political reasons, they're lying or ignorant. You cannot escape politics. One election or new law can redraw the landscape overnight. Also I doubt you "depend" on any sin…
Sure but we're a nonprofit operating on shoestring budget, and given that we've had a web presence since the aughts without having to deal with CEO temper tantrums says a lot about where this kind of attitude stands. If you think somebody who runs an international company is behaving appropriately by bitching and threatening on twitter than I fear for your infra more than I fear for mine.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#956Earlier quoted context omitted.
Governments just can't come to grips with how much money software engineers make. Paying a contractor $x million? Yeah no problem, projects are projects, they cost what they cost. Does that $x million pay for 5x fewer people than it would in construction or road repair? We don't know, we don't care, this is the best bid we got for the requirements, and in line with what similar IT projects cost us before. Paying a ju…
> Paying a junior employee $100k? "We can't do that, the agency director has worked here for 40 years, and he doesn't make that much." I can assure you that junior software engineers in Italy or anywhere else in the EU make nowhere near that amount of money. In fact, few of even the most senior software engineers make that amount of money anywhere in the EU (in Switzerland or the UK they might see such salaries, at t…
> in Switzerland they might see such salaries, at the higher tiers
Putting UK and Switzerland in the same pot is wrong, the pay scales are totally different. 100k$ is 80k CHF which is entry level salary for a SWE. The difference between Switzerland and US is at senior level (reaching 160k CHF is much more difficult than reaching 200k$).
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#957Italian 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…
We live and have lived in a technological civilization for more than a hundred years. Legislators have NO EXCUSE to hide behind 'we don't understand the technology'. Sure computers are complex. But so are nuclear reactors, combustion engines and food safety. If nuclear reactors cost 3x what they should, yet safety incidents occur 2x as often as they could because of stupid legislation, they shouldn't be able to hide…
This! Cazzo
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#958Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't like the risk of the mouth-breather next door reading Russian propaganda, it's not myself I'm concerned about. In a democracy, most people are unfortunately stupid and easily manipulable. We can't let the Russians (or the Americans!) use them as their proxy.
So you want to censor what other people read? I don't think your neighbor would appreciate such patronizing attitude.
I don't want them unknowingly consuming foreign propaganda campaign content and maximally politically divisive conversation.
Having spaces where identities are confirmed is really important for honest and open debate. Screaming at each other in Reddit and Facebook comments amongst society-fracturing influence campaigns isn't free speech.
And if someone wants to leave the identity confirmed space and go yell in the anonymous sea of voices they can but we need other options.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#959does he not understand that countries are...countries? "quasi-judicial" is so childish of a thing to say, of all people by a CEO. I don't even care about the details of the law, what is he aiming to achieve here by disrespecting their government as a foreigner and accusing them of "censorship". Makes wish they'd fine him just for that tweet alone. You do what a country tells you to do as a foreigner, or you leave. Th…
part of democracy is being free to criticize. And their threat to leave italian market is fair too
Part of democracy is that the people of that country get to criticize their own government. It is anti-democratic for a wealthy and powerful individual of a foreign country to undermine a democratically instituted governmental organization. Italians get to have a voice in the governance of Italy and criticize their own government, that's democracy. We just had our democracy destroyed by another billionaire, quite frankly people like Musk are the biggest dangers to democracy right now, powerful individuals wielding unequal influence over democracies, where they use that influence to use democracy as a proxy for their oligarchy.
Re: Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
#960Let's be a bit more honest here, I think the Italian law is badly defined, but I also think the american perspective is wrong. We (all tech people everywhere me included) argued for a lot of time for free speech on the internet, but the result currently is that we built a system that is free speech for Russian and Chinese bots and actors. In Europe we are under daily attack from Russian accounts that spread massive a…
The problem with this argument, and why free speech absolutism is the only stance that makes sense, is that someone always has a good reason why you need to throw the bathwater out right now, baby be dammed. The end result is worse than the disinformation.
Free speech absolutism is not necessary at all. We can be thoughtful about it. Think about the American criminal justice system and the criminal culpability standard of "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt". We have the concept of being "reasonable" at the core of our justice system for centuries and it works far more often than it fails. And certainly no one has come up with anything better.
I'm also reminded of the last time Matthew Prince was locked in the horns of a free speech issue when there was outcry for Cloudflare to stop platforming Daily Stormer and Kiwi Farms. Sites that were claiming their free speech rights to not only spread hate, but to doxx and threaten and, by extension, chill the speech of people they disliked. Hence, free speech is not unlimited. Some speech restricts the speech of others. And then it is very much the responsibility of regulators to step in and make a judgment.