79 comments
More discussion,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46555760 ("Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines (twitter.com/eastdakota)"; 1104 comments)
https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492
https://torrentfreak.com/italy-fines-cloudflare-e14-million-...
Italian IT guy here. I understand Cloudflare’s position. BUT IMO making this only "Cloudflare good vs Italy bad" is too simple.
Italy’s anti-piracy system (Piracy Shield) is a shitshow: too fast, too automated, and often unfair. And "shit happens" is not ok when legit services get blocked too (like Google Drive on 19 Oct 2024).
One point: if a private company can say "we will not comply" and also hint they can pull services from an entire country, this is not legal stuff anymore, it’s soft power. DNS and DDoS protection is infrastructure, and infrastructure is not neutral.
So here we have a critical infrastructure player taking a strong position, and becoming a political actor, and lately it doesn’t always feel accidental.
One more tiny thing: Cloudflare did not fully leave Russia after the 2022 invasion, saying "Russia needs more access to the Internet, not less". So... for me it feels a bit weird to frame this as an "Italian law" problem (valid point), when the real question is: who decides, and with what responsibility, when infrastructure providers should comply or resist?
It seems reasonable that the infrastructure providers would decide who they service, and on what terms. If countries decide to pass laws that are impractical or violate clear moral boundaries around things like free speech or due process, then they are running the risk that people will stop working with them. That's part of the cost.
But I'm sort of an extremist in this regard, I guess. My belief is that companies should be able to choose who they service. So when Google threatened to leave Australia or Canada over the news link taxes, it felt like that's Google's prerogative. I feel the same way about Cloudflare here.
The CEO's outrage is most likely politically motivated. The current US administration appears to support basically all of the US tech companies against any foreign regulation. Therefore, it makes sense to kick and scream in this case to see if the US government will pressure Italy to make life easier for them.
Note that I mostly agree that the Italian anti-piracy system (and these kinds of systems in general) are super problematic, and it's like using a nuke to crack a walnut.
It's about precedence in cases like this as the dominos fall quickly otherwise. If you stop the roots from growing then other countries won't get ideas. It's why companies should totally ban the Brit geo for all the daft laws they enact.
Very well said.
Also, Cloudflare could charge Serie A a ton if money for "Piracy prevention services".
Serie A is not short of cash.
They tried a variant of this in Australia for a short period of time before realising IP blocking accidentally takes down thousands of legitimate businesses on shared hosting.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-17/concern-over-asic-int...
They didn’t repeal the law but instead worked out better ways of using the existing powers after a review.
https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/sites/default/files/austra...
It was inevitable. I’ve learned over the last few decades that people who actually understand how the Internet works don’t exist in huge numbers in Canberra. Especially not at places like ASIC, which for U.S. readers is the equivalent of the SEC.
> At the heart of the conflict is Italy’s ‘Piracy Shield,’ a system designed to combat illegal live streams of sports events, such as Serie A football matches. The law requires internet service providers to block reported piracy sites within 30 minutes. AGCOM insists that Cloudflare comply with these demands through its public DNS service, 1.1.1.1. When Cloudflare allegedly failed to do so, the regulator imposed a fine of over €14 million.
Doesn't EU have some kind of net neutrality act? Italy gov can ask DNS resolver to just block pirate sites?
It's regular practice to block arbitrary websites in EU countries. From Spain to Germany to Italy, DNS blocks are common.
Naturally "rightsholders" abuse this often.
Common in all countries. US will seize domains from TLDs under US jurisdiction.
I only know this to be done for televised sports, notably soccer here in the EU. Looking at those block lists, they are mainly streaming sites.
Google: CUII (Clearingstelle fuer Urheberrecht im Internet).
It's essentially a Dachverband of ISPs, bypassing all legal requirements and the judicative system to block domains across all ISPs.
There's this kid who found out about it and scraped their API, then created the cuiiliste [dot] de website where you can check what kind of domains are blocked by ISPs.
The verfassungsblog wrote about it, too, from a legal perspective [1] (German).
Unfortunately even if we did have net neutrality, the EU is only a confederation at best, national law supercedes it.
Copyright overrides net neutrality.
Cloudflare would lose a lot more than 15M if they left, so this makes no financial sense. They just feel backed up by the current administration and proceeded to bluff. I'd call their bluff. If they leave some European/Italian company will step up to the plate and fill that void which is probably for the better for Italy and Europe.
Italy's policy seems an abomination and Cloudflare seems to have a point from a commercial position. But that they do have this amount of leverage is a much bigger problem:
> Yet the core issue is infrastructural. For years, Europe has allowed vital parts of the internet to fall into the hands of American companies
Or, is the core infrastructural issue that for the past 20+ years Internet protocols have stalled, yielding capabilities almost exclusively to centralized (and apparently highly concentrated) commercial services.
I find myself on Cloudflare’s side here, or at least Cloudflare finds itself on the side of privacy.
Italian IT guy here
basically I agree with Cloudflare too, it just bothers me a company has made such an unneutral statement - considering how they has always presented themself
Big Tech vs. Big Sports... I just can't pick a side.
Who would you rather get paid? Athletes or programmers?
Neither of the entities they've mentioned represent the professions you've mentioned.
The power struggle of global corps and old world Countries are a fine spectacle for us, who have lost our placement in the food chain to the man-made giants.
> The law requires internet service providers to block reported piracy sites within 30 minutes. AGCOM insists that Cloudflare comply with these demands through its public DNS service, 1.1.1.1. When Cloudflare allegedly failed to do so, the regulator imposed a fine of over €14 million.
€14 million? What the hell is this desperate witch hunt on piracy lately?
> €14 million? What the hell is this desperate witch hunt on piracy lately?
Because piracy is winning.
Its the only way to build a video streaming system that has everything. And its a better user experience for everyone...
Well, other than rights holders.
AGCOM is a bane on Italy's internet. Anyone who defends them doesn't understand the harm they cause to the rest of us, and all because Big Football doesn't want their peons to watch overpriced football matches for a more reasonable price.
I say this because the paid services are terrible, and pirating makes things almost too convenient. So it's not even a question of competing with a "free" product, but competing with something that does better and it's cheaper.
I really hope they proceed to exit Italy and destroy half of the internet for the country. At that point, there will be a huge backlash on soccer and AGCOM
If half of the internet of a country depends on a single US company, then the problem is not soccer and AGCOM...
It is already a problem for the EU
What a shameless load of reframing. Let’s balance that out a little.
Italy is doing something immoral and significantly harmful, foreigners considered leaving rather than becoming complicit, this guy is morally offended that foreigners think they’re allowed to not be in Italy.
OK, they are foreigners, but does that mean they can ignore the law and avoid paying fines?
and they are not simply "foreigners" but the largest web security company serving the country (including public authority websites).
>OK, they are foreigners, but does that mean they can ignore the law and avoid paying fines?
Uh, yes? Obviously? If they're willing to pay a much bigger price in the form of losing all business in the country completely and never visiting again. But the law and fines don't apply globally only to Italy, so if someone is not Italian and is willing to give up on a not insignificant market (and beautiful country) then sure, why wouldn't that be that? Seems like it balances out, I'm sure Cloudflare does way more business than 14M in Italy, so they're not going to be casual about it. And remember, this is just pitting one arbitrary set of business interests (IP monopolists) against another (internet service company and associated customers). Why should Italy be immune from getting pushed on by the second party there and immune from facing the cost tradeoffs? Why privilege the former commercial interests over the latter?
A wolf in sheep's clothing. Cloudflare care about the "open internet" exactly as far as they can profit from it. Why does the "open internet" not allow this polity the right to block itself from that which it deems as harmful?
Did you read the details of the article?
The regulator fined them for not hacking DNS to the whims of the media companies in Italy that want to clamp down on piracy by altering the way DNS works. DNS. The actual "open internet"
I think you may have this backwards.
To me it seems like something they should talk to local Italian ISPs about, not Cloudflare.
But cloudflare do block things. They tend to block things as a rule the American government wants blocking.
The problem is they want to be the people who choose what gets blocked, rather than elected governments.
To me, this whole thing is crazy, certainly pull out if you like, but I'm shocked how many people seem to be siding with the profit-making company over an elected government.
I can confirm that. Got blocked due to a frivolous report. Cloudflare blocked me and categorized my site as phishing. (censoring me from anyone that uses their systems to browse)
No support. No responses to emails or requests for a review by a human
They also sent a notice to my hosting provider. My hosting provider promptly looked at my site and closed the ticket. It was pretty clear to anyone that the report was malicious.
So yes, Cloudflare censors (to quote Matthew Prince) with "No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency"
Granted this could be just due to lack of staff and support
> The problem is they want to be the people who choose what gets blocked, rather than elected governments.
AGCOM is elected?
They requested a worldwide block, as a bolivian citizen I have not voted for any italian government officials. This article seems heavily biased, ignoring this specific point is really strange.
I guess Bolivian people like to watch soccer live too while that match stream was paid for by an Italian media company. I am not in favour of any of this, but it is easy to defend that request? Legal or fair or not?
If you ignore the fact that the requests that these companies have made previously show incompetence, like when they randomly blocked google drive due to it being used to host copyrighted content. Do you want them randomly disabling CDNs or other sites globally if any user happens to use them for piracy?
https://www.ansa.it/canale_tecnologia/notizie/cybersecurity/...
Cloudflare is an ISP operating in Italy. If you want IP blocking instead of DNS blocking the results will be even worse.
From TBPN today: https://x.com/tbpn/status/2011930385555566600
I'm not on Italy's side but I can't say I respect @eastdakota's rhetoric...
> "The crazy stat is that Europe makes more from fining US tech companies than they do from taxing their own technology companies."
That's one way of saying it. Another way is that US companies are so extravagantly huge and violate EU laws so much that the fines are correspondingly huge.
> That's one way of saying it. Another way is that US companies are so extravagantly huge and violate EU laws so much that the fines are correspondingly huge.
Another way of saying it is that because of transfer pricing, basically nobody knows what money was made where (and the notion of profits per country in a world of multinationals with no capital controls is meaningless).
Cloudflare PR seems to have handled this badly (judging by the fast shift in HN tone). DNS censorship is wildly unpopular. This should have been one of the easier PR jobs in the tech world: they were handed free positive publicity on a silver platter.
Heck, HN expressly called on Cloudflare to take up this exact fight[0]; and now that they have, they've still, somehow, managed to turn most of HN against them.
How is that even possible?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43448112 ("Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law (arstechnica.com)"; 9 months ago, 175 comments)
Top-rated comment: "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."
As we saw with the Kiwi Farms incident, Cloudflare, and especially their CEO, are not very savvy when it comes to PR.
The twitter rant complete with some weird AI generated image doesn't help.
Knee-jerk reactions on HN tend toward supporting anything that hurts Big Tech companies. The early reactions on stories like this are about picking a side, not evaluating the issue. It takes some time for the people who read the articles to weigh in. The comments usually settle out later.
> managed to turn most of HN against them.
Most of HN is against Cloudflare by default. They didn't 'turn' anything in this specific event.
While the threat is unreasonable, why does Italy wants a site banned globally? Why is it even considered a debate?
It's not clear that Italy wants anything banned globally.
Lucky Italians. Can we sign up for Cloudflare to leave too?
Italy is on the side of censorship and IP blocking. Cloudflare is on the side of freedom.
In this case your priors are wrong and the parties you should cheer for are reversed.
Just because the Italian stance here is absurd won’t make me cheer for the other party. I can disagree with both of them on different terms.
> Cloudflare is on the side of freedom
Are we sure? To me, it seems like a very convenient choice, both economically and politically
Cloudflare needs to be very careful here. If they go scorched earth and the Olympics aren't impacted due to last-minute efforts, all future contracts will be taking a hard look at their competition.
> The law requires internet service providers to block reported piracy sites within 30 minutes. AGCOM insists that Cloudflare comply with these demands through its public DNS service, 1.1.1.1. When Cloudflare allegedly failed to do so, the regulator imposed a fine of over €14 million.
Sports conglomerates and their lobbying should kindly fuck off.
If they want to sue a site the old fashioned web for IP infringement that's fine. But that 30 minute thing is absolute bullshit.
Pirate sites are probably hosted in places where they can't really be sued.
> yield to a tech CEO from San Francisco
ahem, he's from Utah duh bro
They really should do this, this is the right and honorable thing to do instead of interfering with local governments and deriding of government organizations by their CEO.
I don't even agree with what the Italian government did, but more companies need to do this instead of lobbying for or against laws. No one elected you. The loud voice and influence you wield because of success as a commercial entity does not entitle you a louder voice and power than the citizens of that country. Pull out, if the Italian people don't like the result, they can work on getting things changed. They didn't vote for @eastdakota
Same goes for apple, google, microsoft, signal, twitter, etc.. I fear what all these have in common is the parasitical oligarchy in the US where companies, CEOs and billionaires puppeting the government with the string for everyone to see (what will anyone do about it?), and it doesn't even register for a moment that there is anything abnormal or harmful about it.
In a democracy, the person who controls popular opinion is the ultimate ruler. That person is supposed to be other citizens as individuals.
> That person is supposed to be other citizens as individuals
It’s been known since the ancient Greeks democracy results in oligarchy. It’s why the US was setup as a republic.
Exercise to the reader why everyone thinks democracy is an unassailable good in the world.
> They really should do this, this is the right and honorable thing to do instead of interfering with local governments and deriding of government organizations by their CEO.
plus it will kill their company forever across Europe
DO IT!
(and if the Italians are worried about the olympics, just wait a month and then do it)
Europe needs to stop relying anything on US corporations. The politicians still did not get the memo - Trump and the TechBros declared de-facto war. This is the antithesis of a free market.
Edit: Actually, Cloudflare may have an indirect point in that I also think that access to information should be free. Nonetheless this still does not invalidate what Europe SHOULD do. But the politicians in the EU are not very clever, so ...
> But the politicians in the EU are not very clever
Much worse, because in this case hanlon's razor does not apply
I wanna say we (Europeans) are an economic colony of the USA, but I do not have the expertise to do, so...
However, the institutions piss European IT guys off for years (even before the GDPR), but "there are contracts", things continue as they are
[dead]
[flagged]
You mean Cloudflare should implement the system that lets Italian government block any website in 30 minutes, with no judicial review of any kind? The very same system that has been known to have false positives?
I'll just have to disagree with you here.
> Cloudflare is being forced to censor content based on requests that have not been judicially reviewed.
Why do you think Italy is the good guy here?
[flagged]
Nah, sports broadcasters and organizations shouldn't get special veto privileges on the internet.
How would you solve banning of pirated live streams of matches? Do you believe every event should be accessible for free to anyone?
Content "piracy" is a service delivery problem. Case in point: Valve's Steam + the fall of game piracy.
Okay, very interesting, go on.
Why?
MitM racket issues Italy an ultimatum.
This captcha huckster has delusions of grandeur.