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 amounts of desinformation, deep fakes, just emotional appeals with the goal of destroying liberal democracy. The US government is actively trying to support them by fighting against any kind of European rules and spreading their part of desinformation.
This is not about normal politics, Europe is under siege.
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.
Important to distinguish here that all of these companies are not just Western but American.
It's a perverse incentive that in chasing engagement, the ragebait is selected for.
I read articles and comments about people who were fired or suffered other consequences for something they said online, and the responses are righteous indignation--they ought to have known better than to post these things online! How did we get into this fucked up state of affairs? Social media started off as a way to talk to your friends, and over time your friends have been replaced with strangers, what they can say and who gets to say what controlled by centralized authorities, while individuals have been taught to self-censor.
It is not only the US companies or Russian bots, every government in the world is itching to get their thumb on the scale here to have a say in what the people are allowed to see, to hear, and to say.
There's many ways for something to be better than another thing, though, and a lot of stuff is winning because it's best at "engagement" even if it's really bad in many other ways.
Spot on. By OP’s metric, we should shift all agricultural and pharmaceutical production to heroin.
As an example, watch a really good documentary on something, I would consider it best
But it might have less views than some AI slop video perhaps even generated in a minute
Another aspect relevant to the propaganda discussion is that I think modern algorithms have decided that ragebait is the best form of engagement and this is why propaganda might spread fast and how social media might actually actively help the foreign nation
I would argue that this is one of the reasons social media actively harms but its that profit over all for social media seems genuinely harmful. We need more focus on bluesky and mastodon and other alternatives as well to establish a network effect there but also that I would argue that prosecuting social media / large tech companies should have such a case where something can be prosecuted criminally for a class law suit case so that these social medias can stay better in shape than being deranged
But the issue to me feels like I am already protesting Italian even fining because in this case to me it feels like abusing the vagueness of the law and other factors so I am sure that if we give govts more power they might have the ability to abuse it as well for some lobbying powers (in this case it seems to be football)
Everything boils down to what the genuine incentives of the govts are I guess. I mean some are trying to do somethings but I guess all of this is just really tricky and the answer is in a series of changes and not a single one. There is nuance to this like every other discussion
Freedom of speech for me, not for thee, eh?
I don't want my politicians deciding what is good or bad on the internet. I'm an adult, and I can decide for myself.
Since the US is turning away from Europe's interests, it's just logical that American platforms will be restricted in one way or another. I don't see any way around it.
No you can't, all of this stuff is designed to influence you without you knowing it, or you would not be influenced. This is like thinking advertisements have no effect on you.
People pay good money because they know it is effective, it is influencing you, you cannot decide for yourself.
There has to be a lot more nuance. I clearly see that both Putin and the CCP do a lot of things predicated on the exact claim that their respective populations can not be left to decide for themselves. "People left free would make bad decisions, we the rulers are morally obligated to force them into a good path". I think this is the ostensible meaning of "freedom is slavery".
There's AI generated content with tens of millions of views that is as fake as ancient aliens on the history channel but nobody seems to realize it. If you comment here there is a high chance you did not grow up among people with 8 years of basic education who haven't read a book in 20 years and believe quite literally everything they see. That is what a decent chunk of any population is like. The biggest blind spot of well-educated internet libertarians who taught themselves how to code at 15 is that they in all likelihood have no concept of how the average citizen navigates the world.
The problem with Putin isn't that he thinks a country needs intelligent and wise leaders, Plato would have told you the same thing. It's where he's steering it that's the issue and that the country's leadership is no more capable at the top than it is at the bottom.
They involve overwhelming the channels.
The play is to influence at m scale, millions of individual choices, just like yours.
Your position is no longer the entirety of the defense we need for free speech online.
The issue isn't whether politicians are deciding what's good or bad.
The issue is that, in Europe, foreign actors with explicit ill intent are deciding a ton of the content your neighbours are watching/reading, day in day out, on the internet. AI has made this easier and even more scalable than before. This content is being used to influence or outright decide elections. Elections of more politicians that are "deciding what's good or bad", eh. Such as politicians deciding that Russia is good.
What the actual fuck do we do to defend ourselves, pray tell? The whole "let them have critical thinking" doesn't work, we are under active war and citizens who don't know better are specifically targeted. And besides, we are not gonna take lessons from the country that yelled high and mighty for years they're the land of the free, and let itself fall into complete autocracy & dictatorship. In the US, those same citizens are the useful tools repeating state propaganda, two steps removed from "Just Following Orders".
And full context: I agree with Matt and support Cloudflare's stance here. But people can quit it with cheap retorts like "Freedom of speech for me, not for thee". It's not that simple.
And how did it go from a democracy to a dictatorship? Because he convinced the people to give up their rights in response to a perceived threat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
Goebbels himself remarked how stupid the institutions were for granting them freedom of speech:
> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
-- Joseph Goebbels, 1935
That's a really misleading way to say it. Because they took charge of the entire structure aimed at stopping propaganda, and used it to amplify theirs.
The more laws and government agencies Germany had to fight propaganda, the easier time the Nazis would have had.
However, a few months after he deleted elections
That EU nation can join NATO to prevent it.
Fake electors plot, Georgia phone call to "find 11600 votes". You seem convinced that he just talks, we have ample evidence that isn't true.
> Even if they took over Congress, would that need they would be the new Congress? You really believe that?
I was unaware conspiracies are only illegal if they succeed.
Delete smartphone, logout from abusive SaaS.
Deleting X (which I've done) doesn't stop Russia from influencing the voterbase of my neighbouring countries. Now what?
The speech of the manipulator is not the same as the speech of the expert and they shouldn't be given the same treatment, lest you want psychological warfare waged on your nation.
American free speech extremists like these tech CEOs are either willing patsies or useful idiots in the hybrid warfare against Europe.
I think free speech comes from the same base as universal vote: any selection mechanism would be corrupted and in the end cause more harm than good. That is why the solution is to let everyone speak / vote. If you have some uncorruptible people or mechanism for selection, just use that to make policy decisions directly.
I think the solution is to elevate critical thinking in the populations, so people can be less vulnerable to psychological warfare. Otherwise you're just picking a different manipulator - whoever writes or enforces the speech limits.
Critical thinking even in those capable of it is a limited resource. I can't spend all day every day critically examining every single statement the internet flings at me - it's mentally exhausting and wears one down.
Let's elect proxies to do it for us.
Besides, "elect a comission of experts" is a contradiction. Experts are not elected. Expertise is not determined by voting. You want to appoint or select a comission of experts, or elect a comission of politicians. These are the choices. Appointment or selection will be done by someone else, likely politicians too.
You just hope some incorruptible competent people will get there by magic. They will not.
If you could do this, just elect a comission of experts to run the country, instead of this "truth comission" that makes sure people are well informed to vote correctly in elections for the real government, which will in turn run the country. Why do the indirection? There is no reason, if you could "elect" good people, but you can't.
I don't think that's contentious. The point of free speech is not that all speech is equally valuable or positive. It's that I don't trust you to decide which speech shouldn't be allowed, because that power will 100% be abused, until it's just as pernicious as the "manipulators" it's claiming to defend against.
That "cyring" must have been awfully quiet, I didn't hear anything at least.
- BBC, 2018: Russia: Google removes Putin critic's ads from YouTube https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45471519
- BBC, 2021: How Russia tries to censor Western social media https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-59687496
- BBC, 2021: Russia slows down Twitter over 'banned content' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56344304
- BBC, 2021: Russia threatens YouTube ban for deleting RT channels https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58737433
- BBC, 2021: Russia threatens to slow down Google over banned content https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57241779
- Reuters, 2022: Russia blocks access to BBC and Voice of America websites https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/russia-restricts-access-bbc-russian-service-radio-liberty-ria-2022-03-04/
- The Guardian, 2022: Russia blocks access to Facebook and Twitter https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/04/russia-completely-blocks-access-to-facebook-and-twitter
- BBC, 2022: Russia restricts social media access https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-60533083
- BBC, 2022: Russia confirms Meta's designation as extremist https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-63218095
- BBC, 2024: Data shows YouTube 'practically blocked' in Russia - https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/b0003111
- BBC, 2024: Russia's 2024 digital crackdown reshapes social media landscape - https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/b0003arzaThis decision further restricts access to free and independent information and expands the already severe media censorship in Russia. The banned European media work according to journalistic principles and standards. They give factual information, also to Russian audiences, including on Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine.
In contrast, the Russian disinformation and propaganda outlets, against which the EU has introduced restrictive measures, do not represent a free and independent media. Their broadcasting activities in the EU have been suspended because these outlets are under the control of the Russian authorities and they are instrumental in supporting the war of aggression against Ukraine.
Respect for the freedom of expression and media is a core value for the EU. It will continue supporting availability of factual information also to audiences in Russia."[0]
Funny, eh?
[0] https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/russia-statement-high-repres...
The whole concept of democracy is based on this: you elect politicians, they decide. If you don't like that, you don't like democracy. Which is fine, but then you don't get to defend it either as the best system under the sun, etc.
We (America) are not a democracy, we're a constitutionally limited republic. Republic is a subset of democracy, but the 'constitutionally limited republic' part is important. We cannot elect politicians to censor the things that we want censored because our republic has not authorized the government to do censorship, and the bill of rights expressly forbids it. They are constitutionally limited from doing so until and unless the constitution is amended.
Until and unless we change the constitution, any efforts to do that are illicit. Popular democracy would allow a majority to vote to bring back slavery, and if you don't like that, you don't like democracy.
Democracy relies on having a reasobaly well informed population. The problem today is that it takes ten times more effort to refute bullshit than to spread it. Information hygiene is becoming a very big problem in this anything-goes social media environment.
Traditional mass media had journalistic norms and standards, nowadays anyone can claim anything with no quality control.
It's the same age old story: there simply is no substitute for good governance, Italy doesn't have it and hasn't had it for decades, and "freedom of speech absolutists" wouldn't know what it looks like in the first place.
> This is not about normal politics, Europe is under siege.
I am not European but this seems such an dangerous precedent to set upon. You mention destroying liberal democracy but also the fact that Europe is under siege makes people think of providing war time resolutions to Countries even for small details (and Mind you this ban itself has nothing to do with russia that much, its just the amount of influence football has in italy)
To me it feels as if by saying Europe's under siege, it gives more war time resolutions or justificiations for unmoral behaviour. In fact that's what happened right now. This also actively undermines democracy and one can clearly see how.
I understand your comment's in good faith and I appreciate it but I am just not even sure how this move of fining Cloudflare for not being in line for their censorship is related to this other instance.
> We believe Italy, like all countries, has a right to regulate the content on networks inside its borders. But they must do so following the Rule of Law and principles of Due Process.
I live in Italy, I'm a citizen. I don't feel any safer having the internet regulated by a bunch of bureaucrats than I do state actors and bots.
Not only does it seem like you've gone off topic to push a personal agenda, you're presenting a false dichotomy. We could (if we wanted to) wall our networks off along national boundaries while still preserving freedom of speech within our enclave. I don't think that would be a good idea nor do I think the execution of such an initiative would be likely to go smoothly but the example serves to illustrate that there's a huge potential solution space.
Personally what I don't understand is why Cloudflare didn't stop offering access to 1.1.1.1 from Italian addresses. At the end of the day picking a direct fight with the government of a jurisdiction you operate in seems extremely unwise. I fail to see the upside for them here.
Actually assuming they don't intentionally operate 1.1.1.1 from within Italy how is it CF's problem if Italians access it? Shouldn't this be on the Italian telecoms to filter traffic to this dastardly "illegal" foreign resolver?
I have to say though, reflexively responding in that manner gives the impression of being quite radicalized. I don't think that's the level of discourse expected on HN.
The tipping point happened during covid - the authorities were so synced up with the media, and the online censorship became so prevalent that the official narrative felt deeply off, coordinated, and often contradictory. There was no debate in the EU, we had to lock down all of the countries, with no alternative (for instance, protect old people but let younger ones live their lives) possible.
Given how Orwellian and borderline crazy average media discourse had become, especially after the vaccine was out, I saw many people start looking elsewhere. My mother was one of them. She had consumed mostly state media her whole life. As she realized how stupid the narrative had become (state media was discussing if it was ok to sell socks in shops, or if doctors should examine unvaccinated customers), she and others like her turned to online media promoting fringe and radical theories.
Now, the European bureaucrats, having not learnt their lesson, want to double down and further restrict freedom of speech. The problem is that as long as the local media just repeats the official party line, which often strays away from reality, russian content farms will get new eyeballs.
The end result is worse than the disinformation.
If the problem is Russian bots, there’s a much easier way to solve it: make Facebook and the platforms that allow them to spread financially liable.
You’re unironically arguing that giving up your freedom is a protection against losing your freedom.
That's not a dictator. You're just grasping for hyperbole to prop up an ideological point.
You should be able to insult and criticise the Prime Minister.
You should not be able to gain a position of power and then go on a crowded stage to claim that vaccines cause autism. This is intolerable. We are attacking the foundations of society. People are not rational actors. Not you, and not me. We are very simple animals.
But you're basically arguing for not criticizing the status quo.
Many social improvements have been attained by "attacking the foundations of society". How would you like living under some absolute monarchy? How do you think gay people would like to live in a church-run society like 500 years ago?
> You should not be able to gain a position of power and then go on a crowded stage to claim that vaccines cause autism. This is intolerable. We are attacking the foundations of society.
Not sure when the strawman is. "The foundations of society", for me, means "the way things are". Which can be vaccines, sure, or any kind of general policy which has been showed to have a positive effect on society, but it can also be all kinds of things taken for granted which aren't necessarily rooted in reason.
I would like to expand this not only to foreign state actors that people mention but also companies inside which are actively trying to do nefarious stuff
As an example, Tobacco industry knew that the damages were there but they still tried to spur up medical confusion around it all so that people would still think that medical discussion is going on when it was 100% clear that tobacco harms. Who knows how many people died
The man who discovered that washing hands saved lives was so ridiculed and I think met with hostility because doctors couldn't comprehend the idea that it was they would could spread diseases. This is decades before germ theory was invented
His name is Ignaz Semmelweis and the world was unjust to him. Doctors ridiculed and threatend him and he was labelled obsessive and doctors called it mere coincidence. His career crumbled as he was forced out of vienna/his hospital and his mental health deteriorated as his warnings were ignored
in 1865 Semmelwise was commited to an asylum where he died just two weeks later at age 47
Only after pasteur developed germ theory and lester pioneered antisceptic surgery, semmelwise was finally vindicated.
This simple practise of handwashing is now considered the most basic medical standard worldwide saving countless millions of lives in the process.
(I had to write it by hand here basically transcribing this really amazing video that I watched about such a topic, I would highly suggest watching it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBCOh1SYQYA (crazy people who were proven right)
Semmelwise's stories can brings chills to spine.
But one maybe counterintuitive reason I don’t like free speech absolutism in the social media era — one of the platitude’s of FIRE is like, “the answer to hate speech is more speech” and “I want to know who the racist are so I can avoid them.”
1. The answer to nothin in this firehouse of speech in modern society is “more speech”.
2. Part of the peace we used to have in society is I didn’t have to know about everyone’s political opinions. Loosely speaking maybe I thought small-town folk were close minded, but there weren’t tens of thousands of examples of it across feeds on the internet all day.
If you don't like the risk of russian accounts, don't follow them, and follow accounts that you like. It's as easy as that.
You have news, government news sites, journalists, newspapers, it's never been easier to find sources to trust and compare them against each other.
Screaming murder because Sergei6778 says that Ukraine is evil is just stupid. Take responsibility for your own reading and mind, and stop using the law as a hamfisted tool to stop free speech. Take the bad with the good, or else there won't be any good left in the future.
I'm often baffled by the level of superficial and binary thinking even in "intellectuals" (as in people who hold degrees and you'd expect to have at least a modicum of critical thinking). More often than not it seems based on emotions.
Now have these people spend most of their waking hours doomscrolling some echo chamber on tiktok, and I can see why some may be worried about the influence of some "bad actor".
Given this, and the highly polarized political scene (and I'm in Europe!), I have to say I'm quite worried as to how things will unfold. Hell, there's no need for Sergei and his friends! Just the local politicians' popularity contest is enough.
The level of radicalisation over Israel/Gaza really doesn't look organic, when compared to the reaction to other conflicts.
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.
The part about "foreign masters" doesn't make sense to me.
Maybe the part about foreign masters makes more sense with this context:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/14/jd-vance-ali...
In Europe freedom of speech is under threat from its own population, which is more and more driven by fear. This fear might not be unreasonable and has multiple sources, but it remains a bad basis for decision or policy making.
Contrary to widespread belief, Europe has the means to fight those threats. It just chooses not to, for reasons I don't understand.
Look at germany for example (where I'm from). Shutting down nuclear power plants and coal at the same time.
More than 50% of people here still tell you this is necessary to save the planet - even though what we save is so little globally, that it does nothing relevant to stop global warming.
so, no, thanks. i don’t want this, at least for those countries that are still more or less free from it. i already live in one where we have to fight this dictate every day: opening a browser, writing a post, doing whatever we want, but not the way guys who captured power want it.
this perspective — “just let them protect us” — comes from a democratic habit. when you’re used to living this way, you can trust elected people.
I bet you'd be able to plot some pretty interesting maps from that.
The disinformation campaigns have always been there, the reason they're growing roots in the mind of the average European is because the EU is spending it's razor thon political capital on things Chat Control, Digital Omnibus which are wildly unpopular.
Isn't it a bit ironic that in order to protect "liberal democracy" you need to reach out for authoritarian suppression?
My parents and grandparents didn't fight against the Romanian authoritarian regime for reading of confidential communications to come back under a EU banner instead.
The EU is more of a threat to itself than Russia is, the only reason the "Russian propaganda" has teeth is because the current bureaucrat class in the EU Council have outlived their Mandate of Heaven
Let's assume I want every citizen to navigate the web freely while fighting propaganda machines as much as possible, so that means I want an automated system that creates the set difference between these two in real-time, as reliable as possible. To create such a system, and since there shouldn't be any overlap in these two sets, I can effectively put my efforts in half if I put my work in the detection of one such set.
The scaling problem, as I see it here, arises from the following: While the set of individual citizens (kind of) has an upper limit, represented by the number of internet users worldwide, the botnet nodes in propaganda machines do not. I can limit the set further, for example if I want to focus on the citizens that are part of my government only, whereas propaganda machines can come from anywhere on the globe. Internet users already need to provide a proof on authentication for quite a lot of services, while botnets generally want to avoid being identified as such.
While I'm far from in favor of Chat Control, I can somewhat understand why these initiatives are in motion at all.
> The EU is more of a threat to itself than Russia is
To put it mildly, this conclusion is non-sequitur at best.
"Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
So the EU and the EC are big lumbering organisation that make poor decisions; but then people make poor decisions day in day out. But just because you *feel* disaffected doesn't mean the system is inherently wrong (unless of course you believe that politics' primary, if not only, purpose is to make you "feel good(tm)").
It's probably far more accurate to say that wealth inequality is the EU's biggest threat and that "the elites" (which is more than just senior politicians and bureaucrats) don't feel the pain of inequality and so aren't internally motivated to do much about it (culture eats strategy for breakfast, etc etc).
The polls don't lie and they show that there are hundreds of millions of people all over the west who just flatly disagree with your whole ideology. The unity you imagine would exist if not for shadow accounts doesn't exist, and it's delusional to believe it does.
No no. Just accept that you're a totalitarian dictator at heart, embrace the warmth of just being evil publicly, without pretense or obfuscation. "Silence the opposition!" you cry.
If there is disinformation, the solution is to counter it with actual information, to give the people better tools to identify it (like X's community notes), and to educate the general population so they will have better critical thinking.
Restricting freedom of speech is never a solution. How long until dissenting opinions are censored because somebody labels them "disinformation"? Who watches the watchmen? etc.
I'd rather live in a society with full freedom of speech and disinformation from State actors than have only 100% accurately vetted news.
That seems to be the American definition.
We don’t all have binary systems for our views and politics, and some of our democracies are doing better than than US despite our apparent lack of free speech.
Of course this is all hypothetical at the moment, as the current administration doesn’t seem to care much for the law.
I see your point about free speech but I think it has to be more nuanced. For example, where has continuing stupid anti vaxer debate left the Americans?
So what you argue is that we should build good bots to counter the bad bots right? and all this in a "secret" to avoid suspension by the tech companies. This looks like playing stupid games.
The disinformation in this era can basically shadow any kind of legitimate "counter-disinformation". To make the game fair we would first need lockdown the internet content on citizen ID authorization so that we can identify if the free speach spread is actually published by a real person or some chinese bot pretending to be a single European mom with 3 kids.
This is not something anyone wants so I think the current trade off of court orders to take down content is legitimate and the best approach. Cloudflare, the tech companies and US government likes the absolute free speech like everything else (i.e. free market) as long as it serves their interests. I wouldn't be surprised to see Cloudflare proudly repelling some "chinese propaganda attacks" and frame it like a cyber security win instead of anti-free speech action.
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 to infringe the copyright and related rights of the audiovisual works relating to live broadcast sporting events and similar events covered by the reports. ```
So, I'm not sure anybody verified that what the right holders claimed was actually true. While I understand what AGCOM (the italian FCC, more-or-less) is trying to do, it seems that, as usual, a law was created without verifying how the implementation of such law would work in practice (something very common in Italy), and this is the result.
Cloudflare CEO seems irate, and some of his references are not great, but I'd be inclined at thinking he's got at least _some_ reason on his side.
It’s a mess technically: it mandates ISPs and DNS providers to block IPs/domains within 30 minutes of a report, with zero judicial oversight. It’s infamous locally for false positives—it has previously taken down Google Drive nodes and random legitimate CDNs just because they shared an IP with a pirate stream.
The NUCLEAR threat regarding the 2026 Winter Olympics (Milano-Cortina) is the real leverage here. He’s bypassing the regulator and putting a gun to the government’s head regarding national prestige and infrastructure security.
My personal take idea likely outcome: Cloudflare wins.
EU Law: The order almost certainly violates the Digital Services Act (DSA) regarding general monitoring obligations and country-of-origin principles. Realpolitik: The Italian government can't risk the Olympics infrastructure getting DDoS'd into oblivion because AGCOM picked a fight they can't win. They will likely settle for a standard, court-ordered geo-block down the road, but the idea of Cloudflare integrating with a broken 30-minute takedown API is dead on arrival.
Kind of wild that a private company has that kind of power, both in terms of being one of the few that can offer this service and they can make threats at this level.
I'm pretty sure if you tried that here (Canada) it would do the latter.
Would our politicians pass a law this unfortunate... I hope not... but I don't really have that much faith in them. The current government probably wouldn't, but governments change.
Referencing the Trump administration - the people going around threatening, deporting, arresting, taking money from, etc people as a consequence for speech they don't like - as the standard for free speech makes this far from a principled stand by cloudflare. They took their moral high ground and sunk it. This isn't about speech for them, just money.
Things can be morally wrong and still legal, and the law itself can intentionally enforce immorality. It's your civic duty to determine when upholding the law degrades you and every else more than following it does.
Also I feel like threatening to take your toys and go home when they don't play fair is a totally valid response.
It's a great description of one of the main tactics the administration he is asking for help uses though. Which again goes to Cloudflare entirely abandoning the moral high ground here.
Threatening to leave is "totally valid" in that it's their right to leave, but it's also not something that a sovereign country that cares about staying sovereign should give any respect to. The only response to a foreign corporation saying that that maintains your independence is "you can't quit, you're fired." Otherwise you just become beholden to the corporation providing you "charity".
That’s a lot more complicated. What happens if a foreign power takes over Canada and changes the law? What is the state law goes against the laws stated by your religion?
It’s a thin line, better not deal in absolutes.
not counting that the fines also outrageous, 2% global revenue and IP+Domain block for global despite it only Italy request it ????
If one gets drunk at the pub and threatens the staff after being served free drinks, they get thrown out. Why should this be any different?
In Spain they also have similar laws made specifically for UEFA and the broadcasters' mafia.
And if you offer people free stuff and then turn around and demand something in return, they're going to get upset and like you less than if you had never offered the free stuff in the first place.
Many governments simply don’t have the skill and political will to invest in these kinds of capabilities, which puts them at the mercy of private actors that do. Not saying this is good or bad, just trying to describe it as I see it.
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 junior employee $100k? "We can't do that, the agency director has worked here for 40 years, and he doesn't make that much."
Variants of this story exist in practically every single country. You can make it work with lower salaries through patriotism, but software engineers in general are one of the less patriotic professions out there, so this isn't too easy to do.
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 the higher tiers).
However, programming salaries here in the EU are much more in line with other specialist salaries, which the government already hires many of. So there is no significant problem in hiring programmers at competitive rates for government work. The bigger problem, and the reason this doesn't usually happen, is just ideological opposition to state services, preferring to contract out this type of work instead of building IT infrastructure in-house.
The only way to make good money while being an employee is to have your buddy spin up a "vendor" offering overpriced bullshit and shill it within your company. In exchange, you also spin up a "vendor" and your buddy shills it at his company.
I am sure that this might not be the only reason but still, its a valid reason for many. Do you know of companies/people which do this and how widespread this practise is?
To me it still feels like malicious compliance tho for what its worth.
But given the rise of many SaaSes selling exactly the same thing every full-stack web framework used to provide for free - think Auth0, Okta, etc, it may very well be happening.
In Southern Europe? More like $30k gross.
Also kind of wild that it’s a private US company pushing their current political views on another sovereign state. Cloudflare as a political tool of leverage is a level of dystopia we really should try not to unlock.
That it is unreasonable for Italian soccer rights owners to try to use Cloudflare to enforce their broadcast restrictions with 30 minutes notice?
That it is unreasonable not to have a appeal right for these restrictions?
That the technical solution demanded is technically infeasible?
Not sure that these are political views at all.
a private US company pushing their current political views on another sovereign state
Why? Technically it’s very easy. Wha if JDV asked CloudFlare to implement this on a different occasion? Would it be dead on arrival?
This achieves the advantages of quick blocking while deterring bad behavior, and provides cost-effective recourse for publishers that get blocked, since the bond would cover the legal fees of challenging the block (lawyers can take those cases on contingency and get paid on recovery of the bond).
I would support a “5 cents per unsolicited email” email system, in a similar way. If you make it a mildly enjoyable $5/hour task to read the first sentence or two of your spam folder, the overall internet would be better.
I can rent a vpn on AWS, then connect to a stream hosted in Kazakhstan. You can't take down a website there, and you certainly can't rangeban AWS ips.
DataPacket has a very large network though and is kind of, sort of EU-based. AFAIK most operations are in Czechia, but the company is registered in UK. And there's also the Luxembourg-based Gcore.
"Just look at me, tell me I'm not Kramer"
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 no direct judicial authority. They ask an administrative judge to operate on their decisions, which brings us to some of the favourite sentences for any italian lawyer: the... "Ricorso al TAR". ("appeal to the Regional Administrative Court", which is a polite way to say "You messed up, badly and repeatedly, and now we have to spend an eternity trying to sort this out in a court room").
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.
There's also impedance mismatch between using the headset controllers and the physical ones in the game. Ideally, I should be able to use my own fightstick in an augmented reality configuration.
I'm a sysadmin so I bought it to see if it would work when I want to ssh into systems I'm physically near in racks. It has worked really well for this.
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 behind 'we only have a legal diploma so we can't figure out what actuall works'.
For some reason, a lot of older folks consider computing as a 'low stakes game', as computers being either an annoyance or convenience but nothing more.
I don't know if the system is fundamentally flawed, and the people in charge are becoming less and less able to actually handle the reins of society and some major upheaval is necessary, or the system can be fixed as is, but this seems endemic and something should be done.
To be fair to Italy, this happens everywhere quite frequently. In my country (the US) we do this all too often.
If the law is constitutional it can't be thrown out by a judge in common law and if it's not it can be declared so in civil law
The difference between the two is more about what happens in the absence of a law
Yup, this will be weaponized by the MPAA/RIAA
If the latter, I don't see why CloudFlare is complaining about "global" censorship. The US would simply seize the domains (which they have done so many times before), but I guess Italy doesn't have that power...
EU is pushing for measures against live-event piracy[1], because they frame this as a systemic threat to cultural/economic systems, giving national regulators broad cover to act aggressively.
While football is quite huge in Europe at large, the impact to GDP of these broadcasting rights is sub-1%; however, lobbyists have a disproportionate impact: you have the leagues themselves (LaLiga and Serie A for Spain and Italy respectively), you have the football clubs, and you've got broadcasters. Combined, they swing quite high, even if the actual capital in play is much lower than the total they represent.
Add to this politicians who can frame these measures as "protecting our culture", get kickbacks in the form of free tickets to high profile games, see rapid action because blocks are immediately felt and very visible, and incentives for increased funding from regulatory agencies because "we need the budget to create the systems to coordinate this", and you can see how the whole system can push this way, even if it is a largely blunt instrument with massive collateral damage.
[1] - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=intcom%3...
https://www.comsuregroup.com/news/a-red-card-for-dirty-money...
The kind of hooligans who love beating up the hooligans from the other team are also perfect from beating up the hooligans from the opposing drug cartel.
In Spain's case Telefonica (largest telecom, used to be state owned) is private but has a large State participation and the government literally appointed the latest CEO.
Guess who sells the largest football games as part of their expensive TV package?
Guess who asked a judge to order the other telecoms to also block Cloudflare IPs?
Jokes aside, I don't know, the obsession with soccer is extreme in Italy. For people who don't care about soccer like I did, there is so much you have to endure just "because of soccer"
The way I describe EU football games to Americans is take the craziest student section at a US college football game and extrapolate that energy to the entire stadium.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeds_United_F.C.–Manchester_U...
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/llglrd/2019...
> To some extent, judges are subordinated to a cabinet minister, and in most instances this is a minister of justice of either the federation or of one of the states. In Germany, the administration of justice, including the personnel matters of judges, is viewed as a function of the executive branch of government, even though it is carried out at the court level by the president of a court, and for the lower courts, there is an intermediate level of supervision through the president of a higher court. Ultimately, a cabinet minister is the top of this administrative structure. The supervision of judges includes appointment, promotion and discipline. Despite this involvement of the executive branch in the administration of justice, it appears that the independence of the German judiciary in making decisions from the bench is guaranteed through constitutional principles, statutory remedies, and institutional traditions that have been observed in the past fifty years. At times, however, the tensions inherent in this organizational framework become noticeable and allegations of undue executive influence are made.
2. parent comment is wrong, CCUI is requiring court action by their members before they act.
3. I rather have companies competing under market pressure to find solutions to topics like copyright infringement than the German state (once again) creating massive surveillance laws and technical infrastructure for their enforcement in -house.
DMCA take downs are domain specific with one provider. So scale is completely different here.
I still can’t understand why these tech CEOs are doing so many cynical things even in places where they have the chance to start healthy debate.
It’s so frustrating.
To replicate the rant: Cloudflare on the otherhand blocks me regularly from using the Internet using a privacy aware browser because I fail to pass their bot checks so that I can enter their CDN based replica of a real internet.
The US doesn't have the kind of website blocking laws that many European countries have.
Most Italian authorities like this one are chock full of incompetents, and I'm almost sure they're just caving in to some soccer broadcaster or some crap like that. He might very well be fully correct on the fact of the matter.
Still, the rhetoric of the post is frankly disgusting. No, I'm not taking lessons in democracy from JD Vance, thank you very much. No, I don't think that might makes right and it's unsurprising that those who believe otherwise are so eager to transparently suck up to this administration.
Making public threats in this way is just vice signaling, nice bait.
Because all it takes is men with guns to change what rights you think you have.
If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights.
It's just a refusal to accept the philosophical concept of rights. The right to vote doesn't exist because you didn't have to defeat the entire army to vote against their leader, it's just that the leader benevolently decided to let you vote against them. You don't have the right to life, it's just that everyone on the planet with a weapon has coincidentally decided not to murder you, for now. Laws don't actually exist. Any right that appeared to be established against the wishes of the men with guns (i.e. all of them) was actually fake or an inexplicable accident. You can imagine a world that works like this, but it certainly isn't our world. No historical period or even any fictional story I can think of operates like this.
It's not wrong because of physics or biology, but because civilization made it so.
Like so many cultural achievements, it's true when you can count on the person next to you expecting it to be true. (1)
Which in turn means you can make that culture collapse if you impress enough people with your edgelord attitude.
Cooperative culture is fragile and must be preserved by preserving shared values such as these. On the other hand, in the long run, the cultures that do this successfully prevail because cooperation is stronger than the law of the jungle.
Unfortunately that 'long run' may take a while.
(1) That's basically the definition of a cultural value. They're emergent phenomena based on Keynesian beauty contests.
I would say you're wrong. The right to vote does exist because men rose up together and fought leaders that wouldn't let them vote. And, when leaders rise up that take our right to vote and we don't stop them they will prevail.
> it's just that everyone on the planet with a weapon has coincidentally decided not to murder you, for now.
Correct. Start up a big disaster where food goes away for some reason and it comes back.
We have a stable world where we don't kill each other at the moment because in general we all have food, water, shelter, and I would say enough entertainment that fighting each other isn't worth the risk. There is no rule that says this will last forever. Quite often in history there have been stable times, that then fell apart because of greed and malice of leaders.
> If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights.
I do not own a gun and I have no fighting skills, so I cannot defend myself against men with guns. Would you agree that I therefore have no rights?
I think that you and the original poster are seeing the situation "you are vulnerable to potentially losing rights in the future", which is true, but conflating that with "you have no rights". It's like telling a rich person "you actually don't have any money" because it's possible they might be robbed someday.
You have the right to vote, if you lose that right, and you don't have a gun after that you have whatever 'rights' that are provided to you by a dictator.
One of the things you're missing here is the idea of herd immunity. While you won't fight for your rights, theoretically someone else will making taking your rights dangerous. Once enough people won't fight for their rights, or enough of the population gathers together to take your rights, you lose your rights.
Maduro would disagree.
Or it's an attempt to reconcile the philosophical concept of rights with global politics and observed reality.
Does an Afghan girl have a right to education? A Uyghur Muslim a right to freedom of religion? A Palestinian a right to food? A Hong Kong resident a right to freedom of expression?
It would appear that in these cases, the politicians commanding the loyalty of the men with guns do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.
Of course, that's not the only reasonable line of thinking. Just because people in distant lands don't have certain rights in practice, I have those rights because I live in a great country with strong institutions and the rule of law.
Plenty folks of didn't / don't change their minds about what rights they thought they had/have, even in the face of guns. Just look at what's currently going in Iran.
If you're in the US, and believe in your own Constitution, then people have "unalienable Rights" that are "endowed by their Creator", regardless of whether they are recognized by the government or not:
* https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I...
Your rights are, by their nature inalienable. They are recognized (or not) by individual power structures, granting you freedoms.
Under an authoritarian regime, your freedoms maybe be limited, for example, your right to free speech may be curtailed by men with guns. Killing those men is illegal, but not unethical, exactly because they are infringing your rights.
This all may seem academic to the person with a boot on their throat, but it dictates how outsiders view one's actions.
My sister is wheelchair bound with MS. Half the time she can barely see. You can give her all the guns you want and she isn't going be to able to defend herself. I reject your nonsense assertion that because of this she has no rights.
this kind of logic will always lead to everyone losing in the long run. always. there will always be a more powerful bully that steps up to take over. history is very clear on this one.
Descriptively, powerful people have all the rights and weak people have none. This is what we observe in the world. No amount of philosophical thought outweighs actual observations. For example, Donald Trump has (retroactively!) the right to r**e ch*ldren. We know this because he is not suffering consequences for doing that. But Renee Good did not have a right to free speech. We know this because she was executed because of her speech.
You can prescribe whatever fancy academia language you want, but the facts in the real world don't seem to currently support any of it beyond "might makes rights".
You see that this view doesn't go very far.
So why would I use my guns again?
Literally two thousand years of civilization were spent on combating the pockets in which people live by that principle.
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.
We're not discussing Pol Pot's views on cooking either, even though he might have had some valuable insight. Bringing up Vance and Musk in polite conversation to bolster your argument is - especially in the context of Europe, which both men seem to have declared to be enemy #1 before Russia and China - a little tone deaf.
I wonder how many Americans would prefer to live in the US that existed 12 years ago versus the US today.
Virtue signaling at its finest.
Compared to 20 years ago it’s so much cleaner, quicker, more efficient, friendlier.
You must be in a great place as it’s fantastic here.
No. I'm identifying this one statement as factual, regardless of the person saying it. Surely then, you would not deny the color of the sun to be yellow just because Pot might have observed it to be that way?
People focus on Vance in this issue because they hate him and hate is easy to come by. They ignore that popular Democrats and progressives said the same thing. Hell, even the Atlantic posted a piece about the issue.
To you, yes. Which shows your biases.
They have consistently prosecuted, threatened, deported, withheld money from, and so on people who say things they do not like.
The judiciary and both houses are allowing some incredible things, far beyond anything from the last administration.
This year has been off to a wild start and it’s well into uncharted territory.
there was zero reason to name drop vance and elon besides appealing to their rabid fans to bolster support.
it's just more hypocrisy.
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.
People are locked up in the Germany and the UK because they criticize the government, its politicians or their policies. I live in Germany.
(1) If an insult (§ 185) is committed against a person involved in the political life of the people, either publicly, at a meeting or by disseminating content (§ 11 (3)), for reasons related to the position of the offended person in public life, and if the act is likely to significantly impede their public activities, the penalty shall be imprisonment for up to three years or a fine. The political life of the people extends to the local level.
(2) Under the same conditions, defamation (§ 186) shall be punished with imprisonment from three months to five years, and slander (§ 187) with imprisonment from six months to five years.
This law is commonly criticized by free speech activists in Germany, as well as liberal parties like Die Linke and FDP. It was updated to be even harsher by our last government. David Bendels received a sentence of 7 months for posting an edited insulting picture of Nancy Faeser, Germany's last minister for interior affairs. The case sparked an international outcry and got a lot of press coverage [2]. Note that ironically the doctored image showed Faeser holding a sign with the message "I hate freedom of speech".
[1]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__188.html [2]: https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-insult...
[1]: https://evrimagaci.org/gpt/london-braces-for-free-speech-sho...
It absolutely is. Being right (and more so, being righteous) is expensive. When you cannot afford to put your money where your mouth is, everyone knows that sooner or later you cannot or will not follow through on your words. Europe hast lost ~30% of power vs. the US in just ~12 years.
[citation needed] mostly because I'm curious what kind of metric one uses to measure this.
From an economic standpoint, Europe stagnated behind the US coming out of the pandemic, but now it seems to be the US markets that are lagging Europe in the past year.
Militarily, my perception is that Europe is ramping up, not falling off.
GDP EU ÷ GDP US in 2024: ~0.66
I will give you exact sources for the claim later once I'm back at my laptop, but rest assured: these numbers don't lie. And militarily... really? We're a joke. We cannot even defend our neighbor from being invaded without extensive US help.
Edit: Real wages are mostly measuring unreported inflation but not measuring money printing.
Also, if you don't like GDP, you can just look at real wages – same picture.
If you're going to reference Popper go read his work he'd spit in your face for suggesting your current censorship and jailing of citizen is in anyway to fix his "paradox of tolerance".
This is everywhere.
The reason is you DONT want a law to be too detailed with tech mumbo jombo. If too detailed, it will get outdated. See that USA crypto wars ban in the 90s.
[1] (Polish) https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=WDU20240...
Why? Because tech companies have shown to bbe honest and transparent? Because their flouting of the law has ever been anything but extreme self interest?
FFS Grok is openly a revenge porn and CSAM generator. These aren’t good people and they aren’t the sort we want as champions of speech because they are not interested in anything but their own profits.
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?
By the CUII with no judicial oversight. German organizations like the CCC and free speech activists very much hate that this is a thing.
[1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-cuii-wie-konzerne-heimlich-webse...
Jede DNS-Sperre einer strukturell urheberrechtsverletzenden Webseite (SUW) wird im Rahmen der CUII gerichtlich überprüft.
Das ist freiwillige Selbstverpflichtung der CUII-Mitglieder. Denn eigentlich besteht kein Richtervorbehalt für die Sperransprüche nach § 8 Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz (DDG). Aus diesem Grund sind auch die DNS-Sperren nach dem alten Verhaltenskodex mit behördlicher Beteiligung zulässig gewesen (Siehe Fragen: “Was verändert sich durch den neuen Verhaltenskodex der CUII?” und “Warum gab es zum Juli 2025 - nach jahrelanger Arbeit - einen Systemwechsel in der CUII?”).
old comment: CUII is not a governmental body so what the hell should they need a court order for when doing the thing that their members pay them to do? If your not happy with your internet access provider being a member of CUII, switch your internet access provider. I agree that CUII should publish a list of blocked domains as part of transparent communication and proving that they are doing a good job.
It's likely a process thing, Italy has had website bans since forever, but the new regulation applies _without going through a judge_. Some copyright holders can say "this website is infringing" and ISPs, CDNs etc.. are required to shut them down immediately.
A similar system was introduced in Spain, with the same problems, for the same reason (football $$$).
EDIT: to be clear, CF argues that they need to block the DNS globally, and that's unreasonable. The Italian authority argues that they have the skills to do a local block and are just being uncooperative.
Similar to the UK's attempt to try and get noncompliant sites like Imgur and 4chan to block themselves from serving content to UK locations, I think the responsibility for country-wide blocks lies with the country attempting to regulate the space, not CDNs or websites.
I don't doubt that Italy is correct that CF has the technical ability do a local block like they're asking for, but I also don't see how CF is in any way (legally) compelled to do so. Whether or not Italy (or any country) is capable of doing so, or paying contractors for an appropriate solution, isn't CF's problem either.
Either Cloudflare can block pirate sites or ISPs will completely block Cloudflare (as seen in Spain). Which way do you prefer?
they certainly do, they have the source IP and their platform lets them geolocate an ip
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.
Yes 100% they absolutely do.
I'm certain it is also quite reassuring for any paying Cloudflare customer that the company strategy is driven by the CEO Twitter rants; That if by some reason doesn't want to play ball with local laws (as draconian as they may be) and the company is fined, his public reaction is threatening to leave the country. Its not the first time he does this, and certainly it won't be the last. This communication style gets old fast, and IMO this actually hurts the company - I'm a free tier user and would never subscribe any paid products. I think their tech is amazing, they surely have great engineers, but I don't feel comfortable financing a company that thinks it is above the law.
The icing on the cake is the plea for a free internet; You know what a free internet looks like? A network that doesn't make half its content inaccessible because someone in a major company did a mistake on a SQL query. Or a network that isn't controlled by a company that basically just said "we're tight with the US government, so f** your laws".
So I don't think it's fair to characterize it as he "only complains about it when his company is fined".
> In the meantime, we remain happy to discuss this with Italian government officials who, so far, have been unwilling to engage beyond issuing fines.
which, although his rant really pisses me off, further proves your point.
I've never liked arguments like this, because laws are often complex, unreasonable, and unjust, and all of us (both individuals and companies) routinely use our best judgment to decide which laws to flout and which to follow, and when, where, and why to do so.
And sure, some laws and most likely this one, are stupid. I always take GDPR as an example. Annoying as fuck, but a good regulation. Well written, well executed and hits its goal.
However, disrespecting and being tone deaf in communication is wrong, ignoring the intent (Italian based legal control of IP violations) is wrong and treating the Internet as a legal free space (or only accept US perspective) is wrong. Italy is a sovereign state and the Internet is operating there and on its citizens. It has all right and duty to do so. We have to respect that.
It's funny people normally use GDPR as an example of a law so poorly written and implemented that the sites of the very EU governments that passed it are still not in compliance a decade later.
You can't be a hacker without having any Question Authority backbone or will. You don't have to be full onboard but very few nations seem capable of behaving at all reasonably when it comes to technology. And few even have the chance to do right: American corporate empire has insisted countries adopt particularly brutal ip laws for decades, and made trade contingent upon it.
The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace & Doctorow's recent talk on the EU needing their own break for Cyberspace & IP Independence are both important revealing materials here. https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46420951 https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
1. Challenge the law in court
3. Influence the law via political means
3. Try to sway public opinion so 2. may be easier
4. Give in and play ball
5. Exit the country entirely
Do the courts in Italy work or do they do what the govt wants them to do.
As long as they don't go off the rails like Musk and others have, its good to see them pasionate and fight for the company. The reverse is MUCH worse.
It doesn't matter if, like this issue, it has absolutely nothing to do with free speech; if you position yourself as a defender of the "open internet", "open source", "free thinking" or "innovation" you get every dingleberry that hangs off Musk to come and defend you.
It's funny how America can force it's own crappy content protection laws to the entire globe, but another country can't have their own.
The current administration is burning good will to America with it's allies at an alarming rate. This isn't good for stability or world order. I think this year is could be a contender to be the worst one yet of this millennium as we find other despots empowered by America's actions.
Of all the companies to make that claim about in 2026, Cloudflare would not be very high on the list I would think... Also, hopefully you're not paying for any genAI services and making that statement?
Recall the unsavoury episode with taviso, when they lobbied the FTC to investigate him after he helped clean up their mess during Cloudbleed. They always pivot to aggression when challenged.
FYI Cloudflare didn't actually do that: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1566160152684011520
(Disclosure: I work at Cloudflare but have no personal involvement with this.)
It's not craven, it's a mistake. It needlessly antagonizes the market at large to solve a smaller problem. I don't see how this benefits Cloudflare in the long run unless they've decided to throw in their lot with the current US regime. If so, what happens when that regime changes?
Do you call your government if you get a fine in a foreign country?
Unless it’s life threatening I doubt that.
That's exactly the type of thing the Executive Branch is supposed to deal with.
Yes, if a US law is overreaching and directly impacting people in the EU. That is literally how the world works in practice so I'm not sure what to tell you.
If you run to the US executive to assert US understanding of law onto other countries you are geopolitical important, however, as a tool for the US national interest not as a true international company. A true international company would serve their customers in their legal systems. Fight the laws there, try to make them better, but don't strongarm them with other country forces. They are a sovereign country.
When you are incorporating as a company in a country you are subject to their laws. Period. If that includes rules how you act worldwide, than that is a part of it.
Do not get me wrong, restricting free speech or apply IP law outside your territory is IMHO not right for a country to do.
That's one countries leverage against another countries laws.
It is however the business of governments to foster harmonized (globalized) markets. But the US has killed so many regulations and collaborations in the last year, that there is little hope that this will improve any time soon. They do not want globalization anymore but American first. Reactions of other countries will be higher fines, more regulation and higher entry barriers.
And when you want help to improve your terms of trade, you can petition your government to assist.
> It is however the business of governments to foster harmonized (globalized) markets.
It is the business of governments to further the interests and wishes of their people.
> But the US has killed so many regulations and collaborations in the last year, that there is little hope that this will improve any time soon.
Is Italy's actions here fostering "harmonized (globalized) markets", I wonder?
> They do not want globalization anymore but American first.
If globalization is what Americans want, then that is what their government should be accommodating. If it's not, then the government should not.
Even if "the experts" think something is right or wrong, even if some economic factor or other might objectively improve with a particular policy, it should be up to the people to decide. Self-determination is one of the most fundamental human rights there is, too often ignored by the ruling class.
Anyway, not a great comparison because you're talking about legal regulations governing speech on the internet. This isn't a jaywalking ticket, it's a deeply complex regulatory issue involving politics, law and international relations. It's also an issue that the current administration has shown interest in, so if you're an affected American business it would be pretty foolish not to seek help there.
How is he expecting the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics to influence some representative of media right holders who have fined Cloudflare? Is he assuming that just because all of the listed things are Italian they can just make the fine go away?
IMHO this is a time when there are no good players. I support CF’s fight to keep the internet open against encroaching EU regulation while also acknowledging that the US has been a recurring bad actor here. I am not as anti-Cloudflare as some (I have no problem with their pro free speech policies) but I do think centralization of infrastructure is a bad thing, and CF encourages that.
100% support whatever Cloudflare has to do to win this fight. IMO the timing of something like this in the middle of the Elon + X vs UK censorship fight with the current administration providing support is probably the best case scenario.
People aren't going to want to hear that, but in this case it's probably true.
No, it was explicitly created to receive and study the stream of "garbage traffic" being sent to 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1, which were previously held by APNIC and donated to Cloudflare on this basis. https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/
> APNIC's research group held the IP addresses 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. While the addresses were valid, so many people had entered them into various random systems that they were continuously overwhelmed by a flood of garbage traffic. APNIC wanted to study this garbage traffic but any time they'd tried to announce the IPs, the flood would overwhelm any conventional network.
> We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. We offered Cloudflare's network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.
I think this clearly shows the hubris of Cloudflare CEO. Cloudflare is simply not important enough in Europe, and he unnecessarily provided a scapegoat "evil US tech company" for European media and politicians to slaughter. In terms of corporate politics it's not clever for him to attach his name to this issue, why not let legal handle this through EU lobby channels the same way other US tech companies do it in Europe.
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
Seriously, what good has ever come out of that cess pit.
Yes, that’s a stance that is playing with fire. But is it wrong?
It's much less obvious that we want private corporations (or governments) picking and choosing which sites are good or bad. And from Cloudflare's position, a policy of "we don't police content" is more defensible than "we don't police content, except of this one in particular". These definitely aren't the only two horrible, racist websites Cloudflare has hosted.
IIRC (and take this memory with a grain of salt), one thing that angered eastdakota about Stormfront was that they kept saying something like "Cloudflare hasn't kicked us off, so they're okay with us" or something like that. And obviously that doesn't hold water, unless Cloudflare has chosen to kick of some sites, it lends some credence to the remaining ones.
I'm undecided where I stand on it. I'd like them to take actions like this in a principled way. (And I'm happy to accept that there's no clear line to draw, nor that it can be enforced with 100% accuracy, but if you're drawing a line, do it thoughtfully and broadcast it so you know ahead of time if you're in their gray area.)
Whilst ending swathe of agreements, threatening to end NATO and threatening to attack a NATO territory.
The only conflict is that Europeans don't want Russian Misinformation and Manipulation from foreign powers onto them. It's no accident that Musks X serves preferentially content from European Far-Right Parties.
The US used the same argument for their TikTok-Ban/Forced Takeover. They also don't make a secret out of their plan to push the far-right to end the EU. They even wrote about this in their new National Security Strategy
Pure Hypocrisy
How is the "far right" gonna end "the EU"? When my GF walks alone at night through the parks she's never EVER afraid of the mythical far right for her safety, but the other people the far left won't let us talk about without being called a label and being cancelled from MSM for having common sense opinions.
So if the EU were to find its end, it will be 100% at the hand of its own making, from years of corruption and financial mismanagement, from years of pushing unpopular open borders far left policies that nobody was asked it they agree with them or not. That's what will end the EU. Not Musk, not X, not Putin, not Trump, but the EU bureaucrats and their unpopular policies who then use boogiemen like X and "russian misinformation" and "far right" as scapegoats to deflect from their failures like this:
Corruption being exposed on X? Must be Russian misinformation. Illegal migrant crime exposed on X. Must be far right misinformation. Epstein Files? Democrat hoax. Etc but you get the point.
Politicians hate accountability and media channels they can't control like X that risk exposing their mistakes and corruption. They want full control of media to tell you what's acceptable to think, since the internet and social media made traditional state controlled media obsolete. They don't want control of social media and user ID verification to "protect the children", they want it to protect themselves from criticism and accountability from you.
It's not Elon's or Trump's or Putin's or the far right's fault the healthcare in my country has been on a decline for 10+ years. It's not their fault wages are stagnating but property prices are skyrocketing which is what most voters care about. That's the fault of the ECB fiscal policies. It's not their fault public safety is down and crime is up. That's the fault of EU border control and irresponsible migration policies. Etc. you get the point.
So it's disingenuous at best and bad faith at worst, to ignore these long going systemic issues the EU has self inflicted on its voters, and just blame the far right for the backlash it has inevitably lead to.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/crime-statistics-knife-crime-drugs-lif...
All hail the EU, comrade!
To the EU, it doesn't matter much if it's the Republicans or the Democrats doing it. What matters is that the USA is trying to interfere with the EU's political landscape.
It would be bad if they pushed the extreme left, too. They just happen to be pushing the extreme right.
(The reason right-wing political violence is more talked about in the EU is also rather simple: It is much more prevalent. https://www.bka.de/DE/UnsereAufgaben/Deliktsbereiche/PMK/PMK...)
> ...that lead to brainwashing of Charlie Kirk's shooter.
Oh, you have evidence of his political views now? Last I saw members of the admin were declaring them an antifa trans super soldier until it came out that he was a mormon from a conservative family which muddied the water and suddenly they didn't want to talk about it anymore.
If you want to make a claim about far left echo chambers you should reference a group like the Zizians.
> It's funny you say this when the BBC in the example from your first point was caught cutting and splicing Trump's Jan-6 speech to make a fake statement he never said[1] and is now facing defamation. Biased and coopted legacy media institutions like the BBC are the enemy here and why X is growing everywhere.
Ah the video from the speech that was edit to make it seem like he called for violence on J6 instead of the full length speech, where he called for violence on J6.
Since you brought up European history, let me ask you where the far right came from in WW2 Europe. Did they just suddenly come out of nowhere and manage to take over a continent just like that without having majority popular support amongst the population? Or was it an organic growth gaining political support feeding off the backlash to failed policies of previous administrations in Europe?
Because history is repeating itself right now and you're either not seeing it because you don't know the answer to the historial question above, or you are ignoring it because you don't like it and you hope the solution lies in draconical measures against far right parties as if that will magically to turn all those displeased citizens to stop supporting far right, and not making it worse by radicalizing them even further leading to more extremism which is what is actually gonna happen.
You're basically creating a self fulfilling prophecy with this attitude of putting all the blame and focus of state failures on the far right.
> and it has nothing to do with parks at night
It 100% has everything to do with that. Because if you import millions of potentially dangerous and culturally incompatible people from dangerous low trust societies into (formerly) safe European high trust societies, against the will of the majority of your voters making them now feel unsafe in their own countries, and you refuse to backtrack on your unpopular policies, then voting far right is the only peaceful and democratic option the voters have to express their displeasure with your policies.
And you can only ignore, ban and suppress the demands of the far right parties for so long, until they become the majority of the voter base, and then you're fucked and the prophecy you were trying to stop fulfills itself, the far right takes power and uses all the political weapons you built to suppress them against you. Just like 80 years ago.
Like I said before, people are doomed to have history repeats itself on themselves because people never learn, or they learn the wrong lessons due to ideological biases giving themselves a false sense of moral superiority over the others they disagree with.
You see this societal failure on HN as well, with my comments here getting flagged even though they didn't break any rules and haven't been factually proven wrong via debate, yet people will reject and try to silence them them without arguments or debate, same as they reject the other views that don't conform to their bubble.
People always have reasons for wanting to censor speech.
> Pure Hypocrisy
Ironic.
In his free time Ivan comes to HN and poses as a free speech absolutist.
I am not an absolutist, far from it, and I'm pretty sad that you feel the need to resort to personal attacks, even if indirect.
Jokes aside, the Harris campaign openly manipulated Reddit to get their opinions on the top [1]. I was there on election night. The entire site slowed to a crawl. Opinions of people you normally never read gained hundreds to thousands of upvotes. It felt organic for exactly one day.
[1]: https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/29/busted-the-inside-story...
The distinction isn't about "valid" vs "invalid" opinions, as you framed it, it's just about authenticity and coordination. A Russian citizen genuinely expressing pro Kremlin views on their personal account is exercising speech. A state funded operation running hundreds of fake accounts pretending to be American citizens, artificially amplifying divisive content, is something different, it's basically a form of information warfare.
And what I write here isn't theoretical, coordinated influence operations have inflamed ethnic tensions from the Balkans to Myanmar, not to mention Russian-Ukraininan conflict propaganda. These aren't just "opinions we disagree with", they're documented operations with measurable effects on real world violence. I mean this is a form of war, in which some countries want to destroy your society fabric for their advantage.
Every democracy already makes this distinction in other domains. Foreign governments can't donate to political campaigns. Foreign agents must register when lobbying. Do you call them violations of free speech? They're just acknowledgments that coordinated foreign influence is fundamentally different from citizen discourse.
The difficulty of drawing lines doesn't mean no lines exist.
No, I said because it's hard to distinguish, therefore we can not use it as an excuse to enact censorship.
> By that logic, we couldn't prosecute fraud
Fraud is illegal.
> couldn't have espionage laws
Espionage is illegal.
No matter what you do or what you write, enacting "desinformation laws" would require a ministry of truth to decide what is fact and what isn't, a task governments are famously incredibly bad at because they always have vested interests in not telling the truth.
> A state funded operation running hundreds of fake accounts pretending to be American citizens, artificially amplifying divisive content, is something different, it's basically a form of information warfare
And yet it is still speech and not distinguishable from genuine Russians sharing their opinions. It is easy to refute the opinions of many a people by discrediting them to be of the origin of a manufactured propaganda machine. Once you start doing this for foreign people, the next logical step is to continue this strategy for local activists or political opponents.
> And what I write here isn't theoretical, coordinated influence operations have inflamed ethnic tensions from the Balkans to Myanmar, not to mention Russian-Ukraininan conflict propaganda. These aren't just "opinions we disagree with", they're documented operations with measurable effects on real world violence. I mean this is a form of war, in which some countries want to destroy your society fabric for their advantage
I know this to be factual. I'm not denying it's existence at all. I'm making a point here. I don't want the government to hold these tools you propose. Any law enacted and every power given will not only be wielded by a government of parties you support, but also at one point by factions you disagree with entirely.
You are all over this thread in god knows how many comments arguing about Germany and world wide censorship whereas this thread - and the fine - is about copyright and Italy. The second they use it for anything else I'll be happy to jump the line but until then they are - for once - using this law as it is intended and it doesn't really matter that there are other unrelated wrongs that you could commit using the same mechanism.
If your defense for going after fraud and espionage is its illegal, are you fine if a country makes censorship legal?
I am all for free speech, but I am not for anonymous speech which is choking the internet. If I am in person speaking with you, I can be fairly certain that you aren't actually a completely different person underneath a rubber mask. I want to at least know that an account I am speaking to is a _person_ and not a robot, although Id probably want country of origin too.
I do not have a good answer for how to achieve that without having a chilling effect on speech, but maybe that's a good thing? I go back and forth on if its better or not to require you to say who you are if you want to say something in public.
In private, go hog wild.
No you are not.
> I am all for free speech, but I am not for anonymous speech which is choking the internet
Then you are not for free speech. Have you ever considered from your point of view that anonymity is incredibly valuable to people who live under an oppressive regime, like Iran or Russia?
> I want to at least know that an account I am speaking to is a _person_ and not a robot, although Id probably want country of origin too.
I too, want many things. That does not give me the right to unveil people who wish to be anonymous. It's pretty wild that this is an opinion on hacker news, of all sites.
If you are going to decide my values for me, then there is nothing left to discuss.
The "marketplace of ideas" doesn't function when one participant is a state apparatus with unlimited resources pretending to be thousands of organic voices. Your slippery slope argument applies to laws we already have and accept. Lets take US as an example, the Foreign Agents Registration Act has existed since 1938. Foreign campaign contributions are illegal. These laws require distinguishing foreign influence from domestic speech. By your logic, these should have already devolved into tools of domestic political persecution. Have they? Imperfect enforcement, sure. But "the government of a faction I disagree with might someday abuse this" hasn't been a reason to repeal FARA.
Another issue that I have with your argument is that you've identified risks of action but proposed nothing. What's your actual framework here? If coordinated foreign information warfare is real and harmful, and ongoing (which you acknowledge) what should democracies do? I mean if your answer is "nothing, because any tool could theoretically be abused" then you are not offering any policy, right? but basically you are arguing for resignation.
The issue I have with your argument is that you're treating action as a necessary evil enacted by a well meaning government. It isn't.
> I mean we're ceding the information space to whoever is willing to manipulate it most aggressively.
I am well aware that this is a difficult thing to solve. What is it then, that you propose we do?
> These laws require distinguishing foreign influence from domestic speech. By your logic, these should have already devolved into tools of domestic political persecution. Have they?
Yes. YES. The FARA has sometimes been applied asymmetrically, especially against individuals or organizations connected to political opponents, lobbyists and think tanks. It is the perfect example for what I mean. The FARA is broadly defined and with a DOJ under an administration, it is prone to misuse. The DOJ under Trump considered to use it to charge Hunter Biden. The identification of "hostile agents" that you argue is necessary is exactly what I mean when I point to government misuse, as the Trump admin is currently using these exact laws to identify activists and nonprofits as domestic terrorists [1]. We have people in this thread decry the Trump administration for their actions and stances on selectively applying free speech while they at the same time argue for more government power even while it is being abused in this very moment. I am aghast at how this is happening.
> Another issue that I have with your argument is that you've identified risks of action but proposed nothing. What's your actual framework here? If coordinated foreign information warfare is real and harmful, and ongoing (which you acknowledge) what should democracies do?
Do what democracy's are already doing. Issue sanctions that hurt. A large amount of LNG and gas imports in Europe are still traceable to Russia. Invest into digital thinking and digital literacy. But that would require putting your money where your mouth is, instead of arguing for those sweet tools of citizen control. Germany spends below average on education and our pupils suffer. The same is true for US education.
Sorry, but I won't argue for controlling a stupid populace when we fail at teaching at the same time. I will give you an example. The censorship tools already exist, at least in Germany, and they are justified and enacted by politicians that cite "studies" from NGOs like Amadeu Antonio, HateAid, Demokratie leben! or NETTZ. All organizations that receive massive funds from the govt that exist only to deliver "proof" and "reasons" for censorship because of "hate" and "misinformation". Of course, these studies [2] are then cited massively [3] by the media aparatus and ultimately the same politicians that paid to have this information produced [4]. Sometime after, the truth may be reveiled [5], the falsified data exposed, but the damage is done and laws are proposed [6] that enable the government to break and enter into journalist offices and media companies and shutting them down without a court order. All in the name of fighting misinformation and saving democracy.
[1]: https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/how-nspm-7-seeks...
[2]: https://hateaid.org/neue-studie-politisch-engagierte-und-dig...
[3]: https://nachrichten.idw-online.de/2025/01/15/neue-studie-dig...
[4]: https://taz.de/Justizministerin-Lambrecht-ueber-NetzDG/!5689...
[5]: https://www.publicomag.com/2020/07/publico-dossierverfolgter...
So I understand your point but you're essentially arguing that because democracies can abuse power, they should unilaterally disarm against adversaries who face no such constraints. Russia etc have no free speech concerns limiting their operations against us. Doing nothing will allow these adveraries to destroy our democracies from within.That is an endgame of your approach, and I just can't agree with this. So doing nothing because our tools might be misused feels like it guarantees we lose.
I think we can at least agree that the choice isn't only between "government ministry of truth" and "do nothing" and we need a middle ground solution. Transparency requirements (forcing platforms to label state affiliated accounts), requiring disclosure of foreign funding for political ads and influencers, holding platforms accountable for coordinated inauthentic behavior etc etc, these don't require the government to decide what's true. They require disclosure of who is speaking and who is paying. Think of the US influencers paid unknowingly by Russia, or the "patriotic" X accounts that turned out to be foreign run. Those are just the obvious cases already happening. This needs to stop or at least the public needs clear disclosure of funding and origin.
We have homomorphic encryption now. Let's use it in a way that protects privacy but still helps flag foreign influence and helps distinguish between foreign speech and protected domestic speech.
> So I understand your point but you're essentially arguing that because democracies can abuse power,
No, my point is that because democracies are abusing power, right now, we should be against giving them more tools. The US democracy is in an active state of being dismantled because they have lots of shiny legal tools to do it. These very same beginnings can be seen in Europe too, when the EU tries again and again to pass privacy invading internet tracking laws. We are not in favour of Iran building nukes for "defense", and I would wager you won't defend their efforts in the face of critics when they say "hey, we're pretty sure they will abuse it" because it might not happen, even though abuse is clearly already happening.
> Russia etc have no free speech concerns limiting their operations against us. Doing nothing will allow these adveraries to destroy our democracies from within
If democracy is so weak that it needs to be protected from uncomfortable truths and the opinions of its people (read: opinions you or I may not share), then maybe it's not saveable.
> I think we can at least agree that the choice isn't only between "government ministry of truth" and "do nothing" and we need a middle ground solution.
Dead on. The only true weapon to combat misinformation is transparency. But transparency efforts are not what I'm seeing, and they are certainly not what Ursula von der Leyen means when she talks about the Digital Services Act.
I want to circle back to something, because I think there's an irony in your argument that's worth examining. The administration you're worried about abusing power is itself a product of the influence operations. We have documented evidence (not speculation) of Russian operations boosting Trump's candidacy in 2016 and 2024. We have confirmed payments to influencers like Tim Pool and others through Tenet Media, amplification networks on social platforms, coordinated campaigns targeting swing state voters. The Mueller investigation, the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the recent DOJ indictments etc all showing the same thing.
So when you say "look at how Trump is abusing power, this is why we shouldn't give governments these tools", I'd ask: how do you think he got there? The foreign influence you're arguing we should mostly tolerate helped install the government you're now citing as proof we can't trust government.
You're using the consequences of the problem as an argument against addressing the problem.
On your "if democracy can't survive this, maybe it's not saveable" point, I find this fatalistic in a way that doesn't match how you argue about everything else. You clearly do think democracy is worth protecting (that's why you're worried about government overreach, civil liberties etc) So I think yu're not a nihilist. So why adopt an all or nothing frame specifically here? Democracies have always required defensive mechanisms. We have treason laws, foreign agent registration, campaign finance rules etc. So it wasn't about "pure openness vs. authoritarianism", but basically it always been about where to draw lines. Drawing them poorly is a risk. But as I said before refusing to draw them at all isn't principled neutrality, it's just losing by default.
Don't be fooled. People like Elon aren't pro-free speech. They only want their speech. For example on Elon's X you can call people all kinds of things but calling someone "CIS gendered" is a ban-able offense [1]. Linking to other platforms was also forbidden for a while and in the H1B discussion X shadow banned a bunch of people [2] and I could go on for a while.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2023/07/02/elon-mus... [2] https://www.newsweek.com/laura-loomer-elon-musk-x-twitter-h1...
Do as I say, not as I do.
This is a great way of bombing its business in the EU. Just sayin' :)
Then I read what you're talking about:
> [...] we are considering the following actions: [...] 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; [...]
That's punishing all of Italy's users including those whose job it is to call truth to power (Project Galileo is free for journalists). If my state had a similar spat with Cloudflare would we be in danger of losing the infrastructure we've grown to depend on?
I was complacent and we need to re-think our relationship with them. It's true what they say: there's no such thing as a free lunch.
But as a middle manager of a small nonprofit who makes decisions for my org's web infrastructure I have to make sure our organization's infra doesn't become part of a bargaining chip in a future conflict between a giant company and our government.
Businesses might not care whether he tweets at JD Vance or Taylor Swift, but the risk of having your website shut down because the CEO of your firewall vendor has a psychological breakdown on Twitter is unacceptable.
It is Friday evening in Europe and the fact that Cloudflare leadership and Cloudflare legal team couldn't put out a statement to mitigate this situation within the last 5 hours shows that this guys could run the company into the ground within blink of an eye.
Remember, some weeks ago Cloudflare had an outage because of an extremely stupid engineering mishap, today it is an extremely stupid leadership mishap. How many more strikes should they be granted?
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 single SaaS product where you're completely at the mercy of another company. There's probably nothing that you couldn't swap out in a pinch.
Cloudflare is a business. If the fines for operating are several times the money it can get from Italian users, why should it stay in Italy at all?
It's like when Wikipedia went dark for a day. It punished all users, but the point is to show that politicians are forcing it to do so.
And the ones pushing for these bans are the sport media tycoons: this fight isn't about Anna's Archive, it is about people watching soccer illegally. Because that is where the real money is.
I think it's worth noting the quotes around the pro-bono. As outlined by Matthew Prince (Co-founder & CEO, CloudFlare):
> Bandwidth Chicken & Egg: in order to get the unit economics around bandwidth to offer competitive pricing at acceptable margins you need to have scale, but in order to get scale from paying users you need competitive pricing. Free customers early on helped us solve this chicken & egg problem. Today we continue to see that benefit in regions where our diversity of customers helps convince regional telecoms to peer with us locally, continuing to drive down our unit costs of bandwidth.
* https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/88685
* Via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42712433#unv_42712845
It is not charity but a business decision that benefits them.
Of course it benefits them, it's a private enterprise, not a local government providing trash service.
No one also can force them to provide such a service, try to control their global operations which is outside of Italy's jurisdiction, and if they're not making any more they can pack their stuff and leave.
> We can’t offer free services in a country that fines us millions unreasonably. Fix your government or lose access to our charity.
On one hand, I agree with you, it's problematic to threaten collective punishment. However, I don't think it's unreasonable to "divest" from a country trying to fine you for behavior outside of said country. It's also important to communicate that clearly, and unfortunately bluntly. Did you have a different expectation or suggestion for what they should do?
I think his hubris makes him overestimate Cloudflare's importance for Europe. Cloudflare is simply not important enough. If it was Microsoft or Apple threatening, then maybe - but those companies are clever enough to leverage lobbying for this.
Now the Cloudflare CEO has set himself up to be at the whims of JD Vance/Trump, while providing a perfect "arrogant US tech company" scapegoat that can be slaugthered by European politics and the media conglomerate that he is threatening.
Europe is too important for USA. I don't think the US administration will like the relationship to go sour at this very point in time just because of this Cloudflare doofus barking around.
Anyways, it is like Facebook CEO and Amazon CEO applauding the Trump inauguration; it is a totally unnecessary political statement which fragments their userbase and introduces a political dimension to any procurement decision involving Cloudflare. It takes people's illusion that Cloudflare is a neutral tech company and replaces it with this guy's twitter ramblings, who is obviously an Elon Musk and JD Vance fanboy.
My take was, If you need help from the current State Department, or the current administration, (and I assume they do) it absolutely is a necessary statement. And then, this is them trying very hard to suck up, as is required, without pissing off everyone.
Perhaps I'm wrong, and this is actually a form of honesty, instead of performative theater. In which case I would probably agree with you. It's unfortunate. But I default to the assumption that people aren't children by choice.
What we need is an international legal framework for the Internet. And that includes compromises on all sides. China, EU, Russia, US and others have very different understanding on what is right. But hey, I think US politics is America first and cancel all international treaties. Sounds like more problems like this are incoming.
When you say "for USA", what do you mean by "USA"?
Are you talking about the general US population? US corporations? Or the person who decides foreign policy direction (i.e., Trump)?
Because Trump recently ordered the snatching of a foreign head of state because he didn't like how the guy danced and allegedly didn't take him seriously.
It sounds like you're just upset the Cloudflare CEO sides with conservatives on this particular issue.
> We can’t offer free services in a country that fines us millions unreasonably.
This is normal and reasonable.
> Fix your government or lose access to our charity.
This is petulant and smug.
My suggestion for what they could have done differently is have a PR team handle the public announcements.
TBF what they did here is probably more effective than my plan, but only because the world is a trash fire.
2. Tech donated to Vance (and Trump) under the understanding that they would be a protected class.
3. By tagging Vance publicly and directly, he’s calling a favor.
4. If Vance doesn’t take action, it’s a signal that he’s not worth investing in.
That's a polite way of saying Thiel successfully installed a puppet as the heir apparent to the most powerful position in the world.
Kinda a bad thing to be associated with
Also that paragraph is very critical as far as praise goes.
Why not? There are real people out there who wish us harm, are we supposed to just take it?
I'm not the biggest fan of the US Administration currently either but if a company asks them for help, they're doing what you're supposed to do, and they shouldn't be labeled as bad or sharing the view of the current administration.
Why exactly would that be weak? Given the resources and connections it needs, wouldn't it be actually very strong? Also, I'm from EU, and nobody in their right mind sees Italy as the victim. The politics in Italy gave gone insane and they are a huge example of a fuck up as a whole country. Also the EU, is trying to push censorship law and most companies in EU are fight with everyone they've got to not let them pass and organize petitions and what not.
Also are you all people supporting this law and the fine or do people, for some weird reason, have started to hate Cloudflare and letting their emotions cloud their judgement? Lets forget Cloudflare for a moment and imagine just another company... Would you still agree entirely on this laws contents and the procedures and fines issued? Lets please all focus on the important topic here. Companies come and go, but destructive laws keep us suffering for decades on end, maybe forever.
I have no feelings about either Cloudflare or Italy. I doubt I've thought about Cloudflare for more than 5 seconds at a time before this. I also am not informed enough about this particular issue, some types of censorship are good, others are bad.
That's all besides the point though, the point is that a multi-billion dollar corporation is demonising (as in, actually posting AI slop of Italians as demons) legitimate European authorities and publically asking a bully government to coerce a smaller country into submission.
tldr you don’t get angry discussing with institutions because it makes you look like an amateur.
Would this mean Italian websites would be free from Cloudflare "bot protection" or whatever marketing name is used for those annoying "Checking your internet connection..." interstitials
It seems to do just fine without it
HN does not require Javascript or use of a particular client to request and read its HTML. I use an HTML reader (offline) with no suupport for auto-loading resources, images, JS, CSS or DNS "prefetch" nonsense
The Cloudflare "protection" against so-called "abuse" forces www users to enable Javascript and use a client that exposes them to increased risks, including risks to their privacy and quiet enjoyment of the web
It cannot tell the difference between (a) a single reguest from a single IP address by a www user who prefers a client that is not distributed by an online advertising company or an online advertising company's business partner and (b) so-called "abuse" such as an excessive number of requests, sometimes from many IP addresses
For the purposes of "protection", it considers (a) and (b) the same
CF's "solution" is to force the www user to choose a particular client that puts the www user at risk and exposes them to surveillance and advertising, and surreptitious data collection
"Solve" a problem by creating a new, additional problem
I can honestly see why you’d want to stop giving stuff for free to people taking your money.
Plenty of activists on the other side of the spectrum note of "greenwashing" and "pinkwashing", nice words about the environment or LGBT+ rights without any noticeable action beyond adding a temporary pride badge to social media accounts in pride month or a picture of a wind turbine on their website.
[0]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/doj-targets-google...
“DEI bureaucracies” is a meaningless political term.
I am truly (not) sorry about whatever HR interaction has soured you.
Not everything every company does is related to US politics let alone that of the last 10 years. These “DEI bureaucracies” pre-date your “Biden administration”.
Believe it or not, there are many, many organisations that do not operate in or export to the US. Many of them have what I’m sure you would call “DEI bureaucracies”. What’s your explanation?
On a more serious note, I'm surprised Cloudflare wants to pull out of Italy. Being a company which terminates TLS connections for Italy must be a gold mine for the NSA.
It's a little bit scary that guy is the CEO, his post sounds crazy and unprofessional.
The fact he's posting on X to begin with is a warning in itself.
Why so? The counter at the bottom of the post claims that it has been viewed 7.5 million times. I don't know how this translates into individual people; but still, probably a decent reach?
However a fine that amounts to ~0.7% of the annual revenue and they threaten to block an entire country?
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.
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.
There is no mention of blocking people in Italy from using sites protected by Cloudflare. From the tweet:
> we are considering the following actions: 1) discontinuing the millions of dollars in pro bono cyber security services we are providing the upcoming Milano-Cortina Olympics; 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; 3) removing all servers from Italian cities; and 4) terminating all plans to build an Italian Cloudflare office or make any investments in the country.
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.
They can just not threaten the population of Italy? They are a 2 billion dollar company that has apparently scheduled a meeting with the vice president of the US on short notice? This is going to be resolved politically.
> 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.
You have not given "free services" to 20% of the world wide web that you are now using as leverage.
On the other hand, if I see you steal from me, I don’t have to do a lot of research. I am a first party to the thing. I can be sure.
It’s the difference between a policeman arriving on the scene of an assault and someone actually assaulting the policeman.
The acting party being the affected party simplifies things because you know you’re not a “confused deputy”.
Kiwifarms isn't a pirate site. It's just another site that you think is legitimate to censor.
> However a fine that amounts to ~0.7% of the annual revenue and they threaten to block an entire country?
What's going to be next weeks fine? Of course they should block the entire country. Even if they pay the fine (I could imagine there's some way that the EU could force that on pain of forcing them out of Europe), they should block the country.
Shouldn't Italy want lawbreakers to leave?
I'm not sure why would you want to remind the world about that episode. those men lied, stalked, harassed, and threatened a lot of people to get that perfectly legal website exposed to very illegal DDoS attacks.
The reality is more nuanced than either party presents: Italy is enforcing an aggressive copyright protection regime with documented implementation flaws, while Prince is strategically reframing an anti-piracy dispute as a censorship issue and overstating US administration support for his position.
You may not owe $CEO better but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
All of this should be clear if you've reviewed https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html recently.
the US constitution doesn't apply worldwide
if Petulant Prince doesn't like it: he can leave
"While there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration" and "in this case @ElonMusk is right" are not how you talk about beacons.
UK, Italy, Europe, European Union?
Seems hard to differentiate for many, it seems.
He praised their opinions on free speech. You should be able to differentiate a single opinion objectively from the people holding them.
His idea of free speech does not include critical reporting. The wider US government is trying to shut down the BBC with a lawsuit or has public officials threaten individual journalists to their face, basically nothing is too large or too small.
Horrible stuff. I agree. His statement about free speech in the EU, when removed from him as a person, is still true. Progressive media sources agree [1]. If both aisles, as well as European free speech activists, think something is going horribly wrong in Europe, we should listen.
[1]: https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-insult...
Getting a fine is the first step towards further judicial review, probably.
Just like it's mentioned in Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu, some organizations are designed to extract resources from masses. Italian loves soccer and some big shots managed to get the TV rights for a per-pay service, and that's why they're pushing for so hard. Otherwise I don't think Italian courts would go after people selling pirated DVDs on the streets of Milan.
as far as i can tell, it's really not about politics or surveillance... it's really just about football streaming, and they push the 30 minute thing because it's important for them to stop it during the match.
it's stupid; but it's even more stupid to do draconian censorship for... football streaming.
I personally sure want Anna's Archive staying up, but comparing it to nazis burning books is a bit too much IMO
At least we don't ban books from Libraries, because they contain the true history or "wrong thought" and Republicans don't like that
* https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/ * https://www.ala.org/news/2025/04/american-library-associatio... * https://cdhe.colorado.gov/banned-book-list
Book bans at department of defense high schools are resulting directly from this administration's executive orders.
* https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/dodea-book-bans
We need to keep fighting for the right to read freely.
Meanwhile, waiting for Cloudflare to walk away from their US government contracts to protest these blatant free speech attacks.
> Participants: Republican lawmakers in red states
oh weird, it's the opposite of what you said.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/politics/the-spd-parties...
And by the way, in the same wikipedia link you posted, there's documentation of Democrats also banning books.
Most large scam groups now have their own ASNs and IP registrations, so CF just forwards them the report and tells you to contact fiberscam.co.za or whatever fake company the scam group has created. They are not cut out for this workaround and yet the largest scam groups have been using it since 2023.
I don't think they are currently doing any statistical analysis, one provider has just 3 /24s and hosts thousands of scam shops, hundreds of reports to CF and nothing done, they won't consider blocking the ASNs even when you show them a report that 98% of the IPs they own serve scam shops.
At this point I consider CF willfully negligent.
"In its memoirs, Cloudflare also states that its services: “do not give rise to the transmission of content on the websites of service users; [...] do not allow Cloudflare to know, control, or modify in any way the content of the websites, which always remains available on a third-party web server regardless of its services.”"
:)))
> In addition, we are considering the following actions: > ... > discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users
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.
These people want immigrants in their own country who obey their own laws to be treated like animals and deported to countries they've never even heard of before, yet they don't think they're obliged to follow the laws of other countries.
Isn't this guy an HN user too @eastdakota (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eastdakota), or am I mistaken? I'd love to hear his response to this thread, just as a fly-on-the-wall.
I suppose you're right. You're still allowed to criticize the government's decisions though! This is certainly true in Italy, which has quite reasonable laws with regards to freedom of speech.
> what is he aiming to achieve here by disrespecting their government
Western government instituitions are hardly sacred. Again, people are allowed to criticize them, or disrespect them event if they so desire. What he's trying to achieve is a more just and reasonable application of the law, as it's quite clear if you'll care to carefully read the tweet instead of raging at his supposed disrespect for the Italian government.
Imagine if I were to complain about HN rules and how the moderators are tyrants. That's what @eastdakota is doing. It's one thing to say that when you're posting else where, but not here. he's not having to following italian laws because he's an italian, he's having to do so, so that he can be afforded the privileges of doing business there.
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.
My risk acceptance is not big enough to have all Cloudflare-secured websites in my country to go offline just because someone from my country has a Twitter fight with a member of the US administration or with the Cloudflare leadership.
yeah it's great isn't it
now all anyone has to do to discredit cloudflare is point to their CEO's pro-elon posts
the AI slop picture at the bottom really sells it too
This seems like an issue that could have been solved when it was smaller.
Lawyers and politicians are not who you want to find solutions to this kind of issues.
Did Cloudflare provide solutions that were refused by the other party?
https://www.cloudflare.com/application-services/products/chi...
Unfortunately, no. Europe is not fine and won't be fine anytime soon. CloudFlare's situation is one of the cases.
Europe was fine until it got disrupted by Russia and the US. But that has nothing to do with this topic here. This is just a company not following a local law. Nothing special in the law (it is shitty like any IP law) or the case here.
We can live without cloudflare
> The Commission would also like to emphasize that the effective tackling of illegal content must also take into due account the fundamental right to freedom of expression and information under the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU
[0]: https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-shield-concerns-prompt-eu-co...
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" he makes towards Italy.
> In addition, we are considering the following actions: > ... > discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users
He phrases it to be as if the free tier is a favor Cloudflare does to the world, as if it's not obviously a loss-leader designed to get more people into the Cloudflare ecosystem.
> Removing all servers from Italian cities
This is my favorite by far. Does he think that this will start a popular uprising? My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.
In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand. I hope this ends up as being a push for independent European cloud.
It can be both. I run many open source websites behind cloudflare.
It's the same as github. All the free hosting and free CIs and free issues/discussion forums, and free code review for open source repos (90% of all open source projects?) happens to be a a loss leader as well.
Both are still a huge free contribution to the world. They don't have to do it. They could just have zero free anything.
The only people that say that haven't run a site on the open internet in the last decade plus. It's such an ignorant takes it's hard to take anything you say seriously.
Well done my friend. :-) I'm already moving websites off cloudflare. bye!
P.S: I believe piracy shield is a s*t idea naturally.
I really think Europe should adopt a Chinese approach to copyright, but I don't expect US to like it at all - they started it all after all with DMCA etc.
Yeah lemme just keep burning money to provide a service in a single country.
Is there some idea that CF is a public utility?
Or an idea that CF should just comply with a 30 minutes zero questions asked API infamous for egregious false positives?
That CEO should stop posting but that just sounds like a business decision
While that is true, the datacenters hosting those servers are going to lose a massive amount of monthly income by not having those servers colocated anymore.
And just out of curiosity, how many small/medium websites would have the in house know-how to switch to a different CDN? Cloudflare fronts your site, giving you an 'automatic' CDN, where most others require changes to your site to work with.
rather than pleading to their feudal masters on twitter and threatening to throw their toys out of the pram
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.
In which vein, anyone familiar with The Peering Playbook will recognise the kind of annoying hardball Prince thinks he is playing, but I doubt it works on nation states.
This isn't international law though. It's an authoritarian move by the Italian government. "Technically" and "legally", you're correct that Cloudflare is wrong for not building infrastructure to help Italy censor the web from Italians, but sometimes you should break the law if you disagree with it strongly enough.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but I find it interesting that no where in your comment did you try to justify the behaviour other than to say "it's the law". But that is the problem. Why is it the law? Do you think the law is justified?
> My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.
Completely agree with you there. Seems like a pretty stupid move to be honest. If I were CEO of Cloudflare I'd probably just shut my mouth and censor the internet.
Berlusconi owned football teams, Lotito owns Lazio and is actually in the party Forza Italia, one of the parties in the ruling coalition
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
Unfortunately, the EU is not nearly coordinated for such a thing. And even if they were, regulation is not what will make it happen. EU is in a crisis of financial (VISA, AmEx) and software services (AWS, MS, Google) being almost entirely provided by USA. They are not going to dig themselves out of the hole by regulation.
For contrast, USA is (largely) dependent on China, Korea, and Taiwan for chips. But they decided to attack the problem by investing several hundred billion dollars to develop their domestic microchip manufacturing infrastructure [1]. This appears to be paying dividends already as TSMC is already producing chips in Arizona, and estimated 30% of all production of 2nm and better to be produced in USA by 2030.
It seems to me that this is the way nations take control of their problems. Unfortunately EU seems incapable.
Incapable of being a nation I guess
There will come a time when the EU is also buying their chips from USA and then they'll wonder how that happened.
International law??
Italian law you mean.
Why should 1.1.1.1 block a site because some Italian wanted it blocked? Sod off.
Also I am Swedish, so EU here too. Sick of this whiny victim attitude.
Note the "general line". You know, bombing boats in international waters, abducting awful dictators and "running" the country sidelining the opposition, threatening to take over an autonomous territory of Denmark, meddling with German and British politics and generally behaving very much like fascists and a wannabe dictator.
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.
A group of people who were elected by nobody, should, without any accountability or due process, be able to ban any website they don't like from the internet? And not just for Italians but globally?
Even if you think this is a great thing for Italians (I have no idea why anyone would think that), you expect the whole world to surrender to this absurd demand? Categorical imperative???
Also read the start of the comment. See this?
> as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist
unfortunately this preamble doesn’t add the weight you assume it should. what has being italian got to do with having an opinion on this? this and all the other “italian here” takes below. fwiw unless eastdakota is being intentionally malicious, he, with the cloudflare legal team, understands the situation and its implications for cloudflare better than any random italian.
“Italian here” as in “I am not a random person with no skin in the game / I live in the country and presumably am more well informed on the policy he is talking about.
If there was a post about a law in nyc, I think it would be helpful to hear takes from New Yorkers.
Free speech loses when people answer to critics of a speech limiting law that they should just follow it.
The fine was also peanuts for a company the size of Cloudflare.
Given the current political climate I think the tone he is using will turn a lot of Europeans off: Open threats against citizens of an EU country (turning off free cyber protections) and general 'American Exceptionalism' attitude and brown nosing of the current administration.
He is within his rights to pull out of a market, but this is an example of the now-becoming-classic Trumpism of smugly shouting pretty extreme open threats to bully your way into getting what you want (and screw everyone else who isn't America).
It honestly makes me want to add it to the list of American tech companies willing to sabotage Europe for disproportionate reasons. (Currently X, Microsoft) and start planning strategies to decouple from them, if not outright replace.
Perhaps this is a knee-jerk reaction, but I was not expecting this from Cloudflare.
You’re surprised that an American CEO is speaking out against a large fine many believe is bogus, instead of not saying anything to avoid offending…Europe? I don’t think anyone in the world right now is intimidated by the EU, from China to the US to Russia.
When corporate entities do something bad, like attempting to maximize profits by capturing regulatory entities and bending them to their will, it’s the government’s fault. It’s laundering agency: the corporation has no agency because it simply seeks to maximize profits, but the bureaucrats have agency and are therefore morally wrong (Cloudflare CEO appealing to morals in his tweet).
Very few comments in this thread decrying the root of the issue, which is that the football media empire has grown large enough that they’re imposing negative outcomes on the pubic hand that feeds them.
> While there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration, I appreciate @JDVance taking a leadership role in recognizing this type of regulation is a fundamental unfair trade issue [...]
You may or may not agree, it hardly seems MAGA though.
You have the power.
For sure I won't use it for new projects.
Bunny is the closest option I've found but still lacking in some areas and the pricing is quite different.
Asking the federal government for help dealing with other nation clearly a massive part of the federal government's role = MAGA now?
What did Borghi mean by this? Isn't that the equivalent of a US senator publicly stating that the FCC is outside of the US federal government's ability to reign in?
I WISH cloudflare did all the things they threaten to do, but they won't
Matthew Prince can decide to censor the sites he doesn't like, but god forbid some actual legal authority does the same thing.
The worst part: because this has been issued by Agcom, it is also likely that this is not caused by the current government. Agcom is a bunch of bureaucrats that do not report to anyone other than themselves.
Eastdakota is right in saying that the rule of law is being disregarded. As a lawyer, and as someone that has been studying Italian institutions for decades, the problem is real and is only getting worse.
(in details: the action was carried out by the Central Directorate for Scientific Police and Cybersecurity within the Department of Public Security, Ministry of the Interior).
The domain resolves (by many DNS, 1.1.1.1 included) to Cloudflare IPs :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich
The sales are 'made' in the US despite the customer and the "sales team" in the country.
Trump’s attack on Venezuela without alerting Congress tests limits of executive power - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/04/trump-congre...
Now that they're aware, they're belatedly and ineffectively attempting to reign him in:
Senate votes to limit Trump on Venezuela - https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/08/senate-votes-to-res...
Attacking other countries without declaring war is a staple of pretty much every US president since WW2, republican or democrat. Carter is the only one who stands out (ironically, despite the fact that he had a good cause to invade Iran).
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.
The CEO of an American company complaining about the unfair treatment in Europe is more than ridiculous.
The UK has thrown thousands of people in jail for speech on social media, as has Germany. Both of those countries also attempt to censor speech OUTSIDE of their own countries too.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
Source?
[1] https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/...
[2] "Internet freedom declined in the United Kingdom during the coverage period due to a reported increase in criminal charges for online speech"
[3] "A separate report from The Telegraph found that 292 people had been charged for spreading false information and “threatening communications” under the Online Safety Act between when it came into effect in 2023 and February 2025. Some civil liberties groups expressed concern that the laws were being applied broadly and in some cases punished speech protected by international human rights standards (C3)."
They are certainly very active in the subject, although judging by the last week, they are not really against it in every case
>The UK has thrown thousands of people in jail for speech on social media
That is just not true, is it. No matter how many times you say it
"Internet freedom declined in the United Kingdom during the coverage period due to a reported increase in criminal charges for online speech"
"A separate report from The Telegraph found that 292 people had been charged for spreading false information and “threatening communications” under the Online Safety Act between when it came into effect in 2023 and February 2025. Some civil liberties groups expressed concern that the laws were being applied broadly and in some cases punished speech protected by international human rights standards (C3)."
That is before we go into the actual cases of what those people did. I'm concerned about it too, and am able to freely engage with my political representatives over it. They listen and discuss it, because we are a functioning democracy. But hyping it up and lieing about it doesn't help the discussion. Please don't do what everyone else does next and post about one specific case that on a cursory examination seems troubling, I won't be drawn into it.
Maybe try to get your information elsewhere than Fox News (based on the Nonsense in all your recent comments)
Except Chat Control of course.
Not true… and those that were jailed were convicted for inciting racial hatred and most of them admitted the offence
- right holders used the piracy shield platform to report Cloudflare-owned IP/FQDNs used for piracy streaming
- Italian anti-piracy law mandates that "IT service providers" (rough translation) have to comply with AGCOM orders by enforcing blocks at the DNS or IP level or with other technical or organizational measures
- in 2024, AGCOM told Cloudflare to appoint someone in charge of these matters, highlighted that a lot of piracy websites use Cloudlfare, and invited Cloudflare to join itself the piracy shield platform
- again in 2024, following additional notes explicitly sent to Cloudflare (apparently via snail mail, but I guess it's for legal reasons) and published on AGCOM website, AGCOM also invited Cloudflare to join the "Technical Board" of Piracy Shield, basically the forum where ISPs discuss technical aspects of how Piracy Shield is actually implemented
- in 2025, AGCOM told CF to block certain IPs. CF didn't reply and AGCOM checked that those IPs were not blocked (surprise? I guess?), so AGCOM formally told CF they were violating the law. AGCOM also asked CF and Guardia di Finanza (Italian police specialized in fiscal/financial matters) to report CF's European and Italian sales figures. CF gave these data (which are redacted in the public AGCOM document).
- CF replied with a long list of observations, essentially saying that 1) CF hasn't joined piracy shield so they don't know which IPs should be blocked, 2) there is a pending hearing at the TAR (the court responsible for complaints against government/public entities/regulators decisions), 3) CF has no technical way to "know, control, modify or interfere in any way" with the content published by its customers, 4) even if blocked by CF the website is still online, 5) setting up a DNS filter will be very complicated and will impact performance (latency)
- AGCOM argued that 1) yes, CF hasn't joined piracy shield but it also didn't accept the invitation to join its technical board and, anyway, when it asked CF to block certain IPs it actually listed them, 2) AGCOM is not accusing CF of violating copyright laws, but of not complying with these piracy shield measures and, because CF actually didn't block those IPs, there is no need to wait for the other court hearing. In addition, other court hearings have considered CF responsible when illegal websites are hosted using its services, because of the reverse proxy service (basically, the CDN itself) and the fact that CF services can optimize performance and allow users to reach a website even when it's blocked (I think they're talking about their 1.1.1.1 DNS), 3) over 11 years, CF received a lot of notes from AGCOM because of domains hosted/protected by CF, but never challenged them, and in many cases CF was acting as reverse proxy for these domains (surprise?) 4) blocking these resources is mandated by law, and that resources not hosting illegal content anymore have been "unblocked" in the past, 5) CF has the technical knowledge to set up this kind of filters and should be organized to be able to comply with various laws and regulations.
I think this gives a bit more nuance. By the way, personally, I would argue that it's not true that CF has no technical way to "know, control, modify or interfere in any way" with the content, precisely because it acts as a giant reverse proxy/MITM. Arguing about the validity of this law (although the law was written by the parliament) or its implementation is one thing, but claiming that a CDN has no technical way to block resources seems a bit naive.
Are Americans not embarrassed by the way these tech bros operate? As a European it’s obvious that the US gone from an allied to an enemy. I would feel like a traitor if I picked US tech these days.
I have noticed a trend post-2020 of a higher level of emotionality and impulsive thinking among government and business leaders in the United States. Hopefully thermostatic opinion engages and this trend reverses.
It's fine to defend your profits but don't pretend you defend anything else.
Why I actually use American DNS etc, it is at least open by default often. EU loves to censor and hide.
Does anyone else find it difficult to discern truth in this era where everyone seems to want to pray in your emotions. My gut is that he’s angry for the right reasons, but it’s hard for me to trust anyone who tries to use the words “shadowy cabal” in a serious context.
> Italy’s communications regulator AGCOM imposed a record-breaking €14.2 million fine on Cloudflare after the company failed to implement the required piracy blocking measures. Cloudflare argued that filtering its global 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver would be "impossible" without hurting overall performance. AGCOM disagreed, noting that Cloudflare is not necessarily a neutral intermediary either. [...]
https://torrentfreak.com/italy-fines-cloudflare-e14-million-...
I can't really take it seriously when free speech and democracy are pretended to be important only when the interests of the political figures of the US admin or of Elon Musk are at stake. Those values are supposed to be enjoyed by everyone and followed through on, no matter whose agenda and interests they may harm (or improve) as a result. At this point, they are tools (or weapons) that are appealed to when one's interests (or opinions, or feelings) are threatened.
If we listen to JD Vance and Elon Musk, we get the idea that it's the leftists and brown immigrants and democrats and woke people who are making everything worse, inciting violence and terror, are a block to prosperity and advancement, a threat to Western civilization. And thus, free speech is important to only further repeat and consolidate these points. The other way around cannot be entertained even as a possibility. They are exempt, for they are free of such flaws and imperfections.
It is a difficult balance to keep between universal values, such as democracy and free speech, and one's own interests, such as political and financial. I would want to see more honesty than a pretense of complete devotion to these values. No one is. I am not, for that matter.
I don't buy into Matthew Prince's appeal to free speech and democracy, but I am open to happily changing my mind in an incident where Cloudflare consequently takes an action that would harm the interests of said figures in a meaningful (not symbolic) way.
Thank companies that transferred their national revenue via shady tax evation tricks into other countries so that their national revenue was nearly zero.
This must be a joke.
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 against their interests. No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency. It required us to not just remove customers, but also censor our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver meaning it risked blacking out any site on the Internet. And it required us not just to censor the content in Italy but globally. In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online.
That, of course, is DISGUSTING and even before yesterday’s fine we had multiple legal challenges pending against the underlying scheme. We, of course, will now fight the unjust fine. Not just because it’s wrong for us but because it is wrong for democratic values.
In addition, we are considering the following actions: 1) discontinuing the millions of dollars in pro bono cyber security services we are providing the upcoming Milano-Cortina Olympics; 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; 3) removing all servers from Italian cities; and 4) terminating all plans to build an Italian Cloudflare office or make any investments in the country.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. While there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration, I appreciate @JDVance taking a leadership role in recognizing this type of regulation is a fundamental unfair trade issue that also threatens democratic values. 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.
I will be in DC first thing next week to discuss this with U.S. administration officials and I’ll be meeting with the IOC in Lausanne shortly after to outline the risk to the Olympic Games if @Cloudflare withdraws our cyber security protection.
In the meantime, we remain happy to discuss this with Italian government officials who, so far, have been unwilling to engage beyond issuing fines. We believe Italy, like all countries, has a right to regulate the content on networks inside its borders. But they must do so following the Rule of Law and principles of Due Process. And Italy certainly has no right to regulate what is and is not allowed on the Internet in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Brazil, India or anywhere outside its borders.
THIS IS AN IMPORTANT FIGHT AND WE WILL WIN!!!
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.
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.
Hell, I think AGCOM will probably rescind the fine for the sole reason they found out someone who's taking them seriously for the first time.
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.
Choose your poison, I guess.
As for the rest of the threats: please do. Europe needs less, not more dependencies on USD and US companies. We'll figure it out, or not.
It’s not clear which way the decisions will go in reality. Past experience suggests that tech companies eventually accommodate local laws, trading complexity of explaining this to customers for complexity of implementing targeted blocking tools.
censor from the Internet any sites a shadowy cabal
of European media elites deemed against their interests
Consider La Liga in Spain. When football matches are on they have a blank check to block whatever they want wherever they want. Genuinely they take down all of cloudflare and all kinds of shit. I think they were even DNS banning everyone on .tv TLD. Its wild how much legal power they have.
This was brought up on hacker news often.
They also have their apps spy on users microphones and gps to detect where someone might be watching their streams to make sure you aren't doing it in bars. [1]
Italian media is trying to do similar stuff with their piracy shield stuff. [2]
AtomicDig219303 on Reddit when Italy blocked all of google drive.
> Wait, I don't think that your post describes how fucking idiotic this whole thing is. Piracy shield is a system implemented by AGCOM (which as OP said is a governing agency) and basically "gifted" to the fucking mafia that is Serie A (yes, the football/soccer league) to block access to pirated streams of football matches.
[0] https://reclaimthenet.org/laligas-anti-piracy-crackdown-trig...
[1] https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/06/12/inenglish/15603...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1mgq41i/italys_pira...
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.
Each of these factions trying to kill the open internet is doing it for selfish reasons and all are in the wrong for doing so. You’re strangling an international commons for your geopolitical games. Shame on all of you!
If the US media elites had convinced California to do that, they'd be a "shadowy cabal of [US] media elites", even if there was opposition from the rest of the USA.
Again, don't read too much into if this would actually work in the USA, the EU is not the USA, this isn't that kind of comment.
And that is an achievement given how moronic the current Italian government is.
I can't ad hoc the best solution for all, but asking for help from Elon Musk and JD Vance, two prominent borderline fascist figures of our time, is disturbing.
It’s fully transitioned to a political reactionary Reddit board devoid of any interesting discussion or insight.
Did it get too popular for its own good or has everyone just gone crazy?
He event went as far as personally canceling a Tesla customer's order for criticizing him. That's how petty he is. He has no interest in freedom of speech whatsoever, it's merely a talking point.
Edit: the last reason given was 'impersonation', which I thought was pretty random
Freedom of Speech guarantees the right to speak. Not the right to have no repercussions.
Elon has GREAT interest in Freedom of Speech, it enables him to have far more power than regulating the type of "speech" he showed in cancelling that customer's order.
How is that different from, say, Freedom of Theft guaranteeing the right to steal, but not the right to have no repercussions?
By these definitions, everyone has these “rights”?
I'm not sure if I'm not getting something. It's a for-profit organization vs a government entity. It's not even remotely similar.
When the house is digital (twitter is), why even use spray paint as the analogy?
1. Order comes to block address 69.69.69.69 within 30 minutes
2. Quickly switch Trenitalia to 69.69.69.69. Which is fine, because CloudFlare probably doesn't promise you any specific IP address, so they can assign them from the pool as they please.
3. Block 69.69.69.69.
4. In the whole country everyone who tries to buy a train ticket or check the schedule sees "train service doesn't work because football, please try again after the match", effectively paralyzing public transport.
5. Average Giuseppe learns about the ridiculousness of the situation and gets upset.
6. The government suddenly has to explain to the people what happened. They cannot pin the blame on CloudFlare (as per current fine), so the only remaining scapegoat is the football association.
7. The entire bus stands up clapping.
What's equally disgusting is that one corporation has managed to put itself in the position to dictate these things instead. Cloudflare has literally been running a denial of service on congress.gov (any many other important domains) for at least 3 years if you aren't running latest chrome or latest firefox or similar.
Like a broken clock, he's not wrong. But it's the pot calling the kettle black.
Will move our startup from Cloudflare.
There's more than a subtle difference betweeen the two.
So yes, my reaction is now to move all of my shit from Cloudflare as soon as possible because I don't see CF as a reliable partner right now after that tantrum.
the tweet starts off pretty strong, which I didn't care for but I understand. this phrase however feels wrong. i guess i don't understand Italy, but isn't this like saying the SEC or FCC is quasi-judicial?
> In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online.
ah, unlike when CF themselves decides unilaterally, not even as part of a cabal, what should and should not be allowed online. got it.
Then goes on to thank JD Vance, and crow about Elon "I censor anyone who offends my ego" Musk as being right on Free Speech being in danger.
Also the "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." which sounds synonymous with FAFO which this admin is using to mean "if you resist us, we will hurt you"
If he had just said that Cloudflare is unwilling to comply with these terms and is leaving the Italian market as such, that would be one thing, but this reads like he just ordered his MAGA hat and is going to suck up to the current admin to get them to pressure another country.
Lets add the hypocrisy here too, since he says that countries shouldn't regulate outside their borders, and is then running to Uncle Same for support
> "I will be in DC first thing next week to discuss this with U.S. administration officials...
> We believe Italy, like all countries, has a right to regulate the content on networks inside its borders. But they must do so following the Rule of Law and principles of Due Process. And Italy certainly has no right to regulate what is and is not allowed on the Internet in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Brazil, India or anywhere outside its borders.
Pretending to take a principled stand against censorship but then randomly throwing flowers to two of the biggest threats to freedom of expression is deeply hypocritical, and makes it really hard to take his reaction seriously. And let's not forget that really vile AI image that is sure to alienate all Italians against Cloudflare.
‘We considered patenting; we prepared a patent and it was nearly filed. Then I had an interaction with a big, multinational electronics company. I approached a guy at a conference and said, “We’ve got this patent coming up, would you be interested in sponsoring it over the years?” It’s quite expensive to keep a patent alive for 20 years. The guy told me, “We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it’s really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us.” That’s a direct quote.'
So, we absolutely can get stuff done, the Americans just keep buying us up (DeepMind) or stealing it or using initimidation (Graphene) or espionage (of Airbus for benefit of Boeing way back).
We had more before Reddit and Metabook centralised so many.
I think we will be fine thanks
Feels like engagement bait for attention seeking. No doubt they'll still keep the Olympics contracts as they are.
A government agency in Italy which is known nation-wide to complain and fine other institutions for the stupidest and pettiest reasons, fined another institution for a stupid and petty reason. But of course, ignorant people just see this single occurrence and make up conspiracy theories about it. (Really, if you looked at some examples of previous fines and complaints by AGCOM you would laugh your ass off independently of your political stance)
cloudflare have deliberately designed their network so that every IP can serve up every cloudflare website
this means a court order can't block a single cloudflare site without blocking every cloudflare site, causing massive collateral damage
I suspect this is a deliberate business decision: an attempt to raise the "cost" of blocking so high that courts won't attempt to do it at all
and then they make arguments about "it's not technically possible", when it is (farm the target of the orders off to a separate pool of IPs)
and for DNS they could apply a filter based on the source IP country of origin
Prince: please, please, please exercise your empty threat, and withdraw your shitty company's services from Italy
and then you'll watch as Italy then raises it at the EU level, and then you'll have to do the same there too
Not true. Cloudflare can't block only a single web site _by IP address_ but that's pretty common with IPv4, The same is true of Fastly and AWS and I'd be shocked if there's a mass-market CDN out there that has a unique IPv4 address per customer.
They can absolutely block any site they want at the application layer (SNI or Host header or whatever they use, IDK, I'm a network guy).
fortunately you only need to farm out the ones out that are under court orders
> They can absolutely block any site they want at the application layer (SNI or Host header or whatever they use, IDK, I'm a network guy).
these court orders usually work by getting end user ISPs (which are regulated) to block or reroute the IP and/or DNS entry
neither of which can be realistically done due to conscious decisions by cloudflare
It’s an old story. You make a guy’s life hard and the next thing you know he’s working with your enemies even though he’d rather be free. He has no choice. He’s powerless on his own.
Besides, I hope this isn't yet a minority stance on here, a democratic state is hopefully more powerful than a company, yes, indeed. The mode of a state captured by the biggest enterprises isn't really something we should run to, right?
What mr. twitter account could have done is vent all his outrage, without normalizing all that other shit. Then he has media attention and most likely some public debate, unlike many other sufferers whose life are less interesting. And you know what? The people could have found that he had a point! He could have triggered some further debate in parliament, some adjustment from the law makers. You know, the usual, normal way of respecting the rule of law, especially when you heavily disagree with one aspect of it.
Because that is what is meant by participating in what we call democracy.
I am sorry for my lack of sugar coating, but man do I get upset by the normalization of anti-democratic thinking here.
Whether this is crony capitalism or simply protecting one of the largest domestic industries, Italy will likely side with the industry that is responsible for 0.5% of their GDP over some foreigner who can easily be justified as trying to spread piracy. It’s hard to honestly believe that this is some democracy vs corporation war. At best it is two corporation groups (a powerful Italian sports and broadcasting one and a weak US tech one) attempting to recruit state power (respectively the powerful Italy vs. the much more powerful US) to their cause.
European nations also have a long and storied history of communications control and they haven’t really changed very much on that front (as recent Chat Control attempts have shown). It will be unsurprising that they exercise their muscle to practice before they do so for a significant event.
Naturally, any proponent of such schemes will gladly hope that organizations affected use ineffective means. In general, I prefer that my opponents also don’t harm me and instead fail to achieve their goals. It’s pretty natural to ask others to play by some rules while simultaneously choosing to add escape hatches for oneself.
As an example from a different sphere: Russia, having invaded Crimea, preferred a peaceful end to the war and that Ukraine respond not militarily but through ineffective diplomatic overtures to other countries.
One always wants others to follow norms while being free to not do so oneself. That usually helps one win. Wrapping such isolated demands for rigor in polemic is a sufficiently standard strategy that it’s identifiable as such.
(snark aside -- either say _why_ you disagree, or just don't engage at all if you think it's a troll.)
I was reading through this and at first I saw Italy as the bad guys, demanding ridiculous asks. The moment the "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." nonsense appeared, followed right after by callouts to Vance and Musk, and threats that he's going to stomp his little feet to the administration...good god, this is pathetic. He looks like a clown. A snivelling, whiny, entitled clown.
lol, ban Cloudflare from Europe. Honestly, at this point all American companies should be banned everywhere but the US, as every American oligarch like this guy does this "We're American gosh darnit!" bit while this administration talks about annexing allies. Disgusting, deplorable behaviour.
a) sovereign nations can impose literally any rule they want on foreign businesses, even if those rules are ridiculous, arbitrary, or defy the "freedom" values of some other country.
b) This incredibly tired "I'm telling Daddy Trump!" bit is pathetic, and it, among with the fact that America is currently -- by far -- the most dangerous country on the planet, should yield garbage people like Price getting their ass handed to them.
The US is a sick, sick country. Nowhere else does anyone have the misplaced confidence to act this insanely stupid.
I assume Cloudflare has a great PR team because this feels like a master class in rhetoric. Given how you're expected to solicit help these days.
Rhetoric aside, it'll be interesting to see how the whole thing plays out. Italy seems to have taken out a hammer, and their d.... well, I'm just gonna hope the Internet wins this one.
Did it only annoy you after reading it again?
I might not like it, but I understand it.
Equally, I might be wrong; but this feels to me like the post tries to as subtly as possible communicate that they have problems with the administration (my expectations for anyone who is at all ethical) While still also needing their help. And if I'm wildly incorrect; and cloudflare is actually in love with the administration, then it's still a master class in rhetoric, because they tricked me, which was probably the point?