They tried a variant of this in Australia for a short period of time before realising IP blocking accidentally takes down thousands of legitimate businesses on shared hosting.
It was inevitable. I’ve learned over the last few decades that people who actually understand how the Internet works don’t exist in huge numbers in Canberra. Especially not at places like ASIC, which for U.S. readers is the equivalent of the SEC.
> At the heart of the conflict is Italy’s ‘Piracy Shield,’ a system designed to combat illegal live streams of sports events, such as Serie A football matches. The law requires internet service providers to block reported piracy sites within 30 minutes. AGCOM insists that Cloudflare comply with these demands through its public DNS service, 1.1.1.1. When Cloudflare allegedly failed to do so, the regulator imposed a fine of over €14 million.
Doesn't EU have some kind of net neutrality act? Italy gov can ask DNS resolver to just block pirate sites?
Google: CUII (Clearingstelle fuer Urheberrecht im Internet).
It's essentially a Dachverband of ISPs, bypassing all legal requirements and the judicative system to block domains across all ISPs.
There's this kid who found out about it and scraped their API, then created the cuiiliste [dot] de website where you can check what kind of domains are blocked by ISPs.
The verfassungsblog wrote about it, too, from a legal perspective [1] (German).
> The law requires internet service providers to block reported piracy sites within 30 minutes. AGCOM insists that Cloudflare comply with these demands through its public DNS service, 1.1.1.1. When Cloudflare allegedly failed to do so, the regulator imposed a fine of over €14 million.
€14 million? What the hell is this desperate witch hunt on piracy lately?
Italy's policy seems an abomination and Cloudflare seems to have a point from a commercial position. But that they do have this amount of leverage is a much bigger problem:
> Yet the core issue is infrastructural. For years, Europe has allowed vital parts of the internet to fall into the hands of American companies
Or, is the core infrastructural issue that for the past 20+ years Internet protocols have stalled, yielding capabilities almost exclusively to centralized (and apparently highly concentrated) commercial services.
What a shameless load of reframing. Let’s balance that out a little.
Italy is doing something immoral and significantly harmful, foreigners considered leaving rather than becoming complicit, this guy is morally offended that foreigners think they’re allowed to not be in Italy.
The power struggle of global corps and old world Countries are a fine spectacle for us, who have lost our placement in the food chain to the man-made giants.
Cloudflare PR seems to have handled this badly (judging by the fast shift in HN tone). DNS censorship is wildly unpopular. This should have been one of the easier PR jobs in the tech world: they were handed free positive publicity on a silver platter.
Heck, HN expressly called on Cloudflare to take up this exact fight[0]; and now that they have, they've still, somehow, managed to turn most of HN against them.
Top-rated comment: "It's one of the rare cases where the sheer size and international influence of companies like Google and Cloudflare can actually do some good for the world by fighting back against such laws."
Knee-jerk reactions on HN tend toward supporting anything that hurts Big Tech companies. The early reactions on stories like this are about picking a side, not evaluating the issue. It takes some time for the people who read the articles to weigh in. The comments usually settle out later.
I'm not on Italy's side but I can't say I respect @eastdakota's rhetoric...
> "The crazy stat is that Europe makes more from fining US tech companies than they do from taxing their own technology companies."
That's one way of saying it. Another way is that US companies are so extravagantly huge and violate EU laws so much that the fines are correspondingly huge.
A wolf in sheep's clothing. Cloudflare care about the "open internet" exactly as far as they can profit from it. Why does the "open internet" not allow this polity the right to block itself from that which it deems as harmful?
The regulator fined them for not hacking DNS to the whims of the media companies in Italy that want to clamp down on piracy by altering the way DNS works. DNS. The actual "open internet"
I think you may have this backwards.
To me it seems like something they should talk to local Italian ISPs about, not Cloudflare.
But cloudflare do block things. They tend to block things as a rule the American government wants blocking.
The problem is they want to be the people who choose what gets blocked, rather than elected governments.
To me, this whole thing is crazy, certainly pull out if you like, but I'm shocked how many people seem to be siding with the profit-making company over an elected government.
I can confirm that. Got blocked due to a frivolous report. Cloudflare blocked me and categorized my site as phishing. (censoring me from anyone that uses their systems to browse)
No support. No responses to emails or requests for a review by a human
They also sent a notice to my hosting provider. My hosting provider promptly looked at my site and closed the ticket. It was pretty clear to anyone that the report was malicious.
So yes, Cloudflare censors (to quote Matthew Prince) with "No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency"
Granted this could be just due to lack of staff and support
They requested a worldwide block, as a bolivian citizen I have not voted for any italian government officials.
This article seems heavily biased, ignoring this specific point is really strange.
I guess Bolivian people like to watch soccer live too while that match stream was paid for by an Italian media company. I am not in favour of any of this, but it is easy to defend that request? Legal or fair or not?
If you ignore the fact that the requests that these companies have made previously show incompetence, like when they randomly blocked google drive due to it being used to host copyrighted content. Do you want them randomly disabling CDNs or other sites globally if any user happens to use them for piracy?
> The law requires internet service providers to block reported piracy sites within 30 minutes. AGCOM insists that Cloudflare comply with these demands through its public DNS service, 1.1.1.1. When Cloudflare allegedly failed to do so, the regulator imposed a fine of over €14 million.
Sports conglomerates and their lobbying should kindly fuck off.
If they want to sue a site the old fashioned web for IP infringement that's fine. But that 30 minute thing is absolute bullshit.
They really should do this, this is the right and honorable thing to do instead of interfering with local governments and deriding of government organizations by their CEO.
I don't even agree with what the Italian government did, but more companies need to do this instead of lobbying for or against laws. No one elected you. The loud voice and influence you wield because of success as a commercial entity does not entitle you a louder voice and power than the citizens of that country. Pull out, if the Italian people don't like the result, they can work on getting things changed. They didn't vote for @eastdakota
Same goes for apple, google, microsoft, signal, twitter, etc.. I fear what all these have in common is the parasitical oligarchy in the US where companies, CEOs and billionaires puppeting the government with the string for everyone to see (what will anyone do about it?), and it doesn't even register for a moment that there is anything abnormal or harmful about it.
In a democracy, the person who controls popular opinion is the ultimate ruler. That person is supposed to be other citizens as individuals.
> They really should do this, this is the right and honorable thing to do instead of interfering with local governments and deriding of government organizations by their CEO.
plus it will kill their company forever across Europe
DO IT!
(and if the Italians are worried about the olympics, just wait a month and then do it)
Europe needs to stop relying anything on US corporations. The politicians still did not get the memo - Trump and the TechBros declared de-facto war. This is the antithesis of a free market.
Edit: Actually, Cloudflare may have an indirect point in that I also think that access to information should be free. Nonetheless this still does not invalidate what Europe SHOULD do. But the politicians in the EU are not very clever, so ...
You mean Cloudflare should implement the system that lets Italian government block any website in 30 minutes, with no judicial review of any kind? The very same system that has been known to have false positives?
Cloudflare needs to be very careful here. If they go scorched earth and the Olympics aren't impacted due to last-minute efforts, all future contracts will be taking a hard look at their competition.
More discussion,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46555760 ("Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines (twitter.com/eastdakota)"; 1104 comments)
https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492
https://torrentfreak.com/italy-fines-cloudflare-e14-million-...
They tried a variant of this in Australia for a short period of time before realising IP blocking accidentally takes down thousands of legitimate businesses on shared hosting.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-17/concern-over-asic-int...
They didn’t repeal the law but instead worked out better ways of using the existing powers after a review.
https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/sites/default/files/austra...
It was inevitable. I’ve learned over the last few decades that people who actually understand how the Internet works don’t exist in huge numbers in Canberra. Especially not at places like ASIC, which for U.S. readers is the equivalent of the SEC.
> At the heart of the conflict is Italy’s ‘Piracy Shield,’ a system designed to combat illegal live streams of sports events, such as Serie A football matches. The law requires internet service providers to block reported piracy sites within 30 minutes. AGCOM insists that Cloudflare comply with these demands through its public DNS service, 1.1.1.1. When Cloudflare allegedly failed to do so, the regulator imposed a fine of over €14 million.
Doesn't EU have some kind of net neutrality act? Italy gov can ask DNS resolver to just block pirate sites?
It's regular practice to block arbitrary websites in EU countries. From Spain to Germany to Italy, DNS blocks are common.
Naturally "rightsholders" abuse this often.
I only know this to be done for televised sports, notably soccer here in the EU. Looking at those block lists, they are mainly streaming sites.
Common in all countries. US will seize domains from TLDs under US jurisdiction.
Google: CUII (Clearingstelle fuer Urheberrecht im Internet).
It's essentially a Dachverband of ISPs, bypassing all legal requirements and the judicative system to block domains across all ISPs.
There's this kid who found out about it and scraped their API, then created the cuiiliste [dot] de website where you can check what kind of domains are blocked by ISPs.
The verfassungsblog wrote about it, too, from a legal perspective [1] (German).
[1] https://verfassungsblog.de/netzsperren-cuii/
Copyright overrides net neutrality.
I find myself on Cloudflare’s side here, or at least Cloudflare finds itself on the side of privacy.
Big Tech vs. Big Sports... I just can't pick a side.
Who would you rather get paid? Athletes or programmers?
> The law requires internet service providers to block reported piracy sites within 30 minutes. AGCOM insists that Cloudflare comply with these demands through its public DNS service, 1.1.1.1. When Cloudflare allegedly failed to do so, the regulator imposed a fine of over €14 million.
€14 million? What the hell is this desperate witch hunt on piracy lately?
> €14 million? What the hell is this desperate witch hunt on piracy lately?
Because piracy is winning.
Its the only way to build a video streaming system that has everything. And its a better user experience for everyone...
Well, other than rights holders.
Italy's policy seems an abomination and Cloudflare seems to have a point from a commercial position. But that they do have this amount of leverage is a much bigger problem:
> Yet the core issue is infrastructural. For years, Europe has allowed vital parts of the internet to fall into the hands of American companies
Or, is the core infrastructural issue that for the past 20+ years Internet protocols have stalled, yielding capabilities almost exclusively to centralized (and apparently highly concentrated) commercial services.
What a shameless load of reframing. Let’s balance that out a little.
Italy is doing something immoral and significantly harmful, foreigners considered leaving rather than becoming complicit, this guy is morally offended that foreigners think they’re allowed to not be in Italy.
The power struggle of global corps and old world Countries are a fine spectacle for us, who have lost our placement in the food chain to the man-made giants.
While the threat is unreasonable, why does Italy wants a site banned globally? Why is it even considered a debate?
It's not clear that Italy wants anything banned globally.
Cloudflare PR seems to have handled this badly (judging by the fast shift in HN tone). DNS censorship is wildly unpopular. This should have been one of the easier PR jobs in the tech world: they were handed free positive publicity on a silver platter.
Heck, HN expressly called on Cloudflare to take up this exact fight[0]; and now that they have, they've still, somehow, managed to turn most of HN against them.
How is that even possible?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43448112 ("Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law (arstechnica.com)"; 9 months ago, 175 comments)
Top-rated comment: "It's one of the rare cases where the sheer size and international influence of companies like Google and Cloudflare can actually do some good for the world by fighting back against such laws."
As we saw with the Kiwi Farms incident, Cloudflare, and especially their CEO, are not very savvy when it comes to PR.
The twitter rant complete with some weird AI generated image doesn't help.
https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492
Knee-jerk reactions on HN tend toward supporting anything that hurts Big Tech companies. The early reactions on stories like this are about picking a side, not evaluating the issue. It takes some time for the people who read the articles to weigh in. The comments usually settle out later.
> managed to turn most of HN against them.
Most of HN is against Cloudflare by default. They didn't 'turn' anything in this specific event.
From TBPN today: https://x.com/tbpn/status/2011930385555566600
I'm not on Italy's side but I can't say I respect @eastdakota's rhetoric...
> "The crazy stat is that Europe makes more from fining US tech companies than they do from taxing their own technology companies."
That's one way of saying it. Another way is that US companies are so extravagantly huge and violate EU laws so much that the fines are correspondingly huge.
A wolf in sheep's clothing. Cloudflare care about the "open internet" exactly as far as they can profit from it. Why does the "open internet" not allow this polity the right to block itself from that which it deems as harmful?
Did you read the details of the article?
The regulator fined them for not hacking DNS to the whims of the media companies in Italy that want to clamp down on piracy by altering the way DNS works. DNS. The actual "open internet"
I think you may have this backwards.
To me it seems like something they should talk to local Italian ISPs about, not Cloudflare.
Cloudflare is an ISP operating in Italy. If you want IP blocking instead of DNS blocking the results will be even worse.
But cloudflare do block things. They tend to block things as a rule the American government wants blocking.
The problem is they want to be the people who choose what gets blocked, rather than elected governments.
To me, this whole thing is crazy, certainly pull out if you like, but I'm shocked how many people seem to be siding with the profit-making company over an elected government.
I can confirm that. Got blocked due to a frivolous report. Cloudflare blocked me and categorized my site as phishing. (censoring me from anyone that uses their systems to browse)
No support. No responses to emails or requests for a review by a human
They also sent a notice to my hosting provider. My hosting provider promptly looked at my site and closed the ticket. It was pretty clear to anyone that the report was malicious.
So yes, Cloudflare censors (to quote Matthew Prince) with "No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency"
Granted this could be just due to lack of staff and support
They requested a worldwide block, as a bolivian citizen I have not voted for any italian government officials. This article seems heavily biased, ignoring this specific point is really strange.
I guess Bolivian people like to watch soccer live too while that match stream was paid for by an Italian media company. I am not in favour of any of this, but it is easy to defend that request? Legal or fair or not?
If you ignore the fact that the requests that these companies have made previously show incompetence, like when they randomly blocked google drive due to it being used to host copyrighted content. Do you want them randomly disabling CDNs or other sites globally if any user happens to use them for piracy?
https://www.ansa.it/canale_tecnologia/notizie/cybersecurity/...
Lucky Italians. Can we sign up for Cloudflare to leave too?
Italy is on the side of censorship and IP blocking. Cloudflare is on the side of freedom.
In this case your priors are wrong and the parties you should cheer for are reversed.
> The law requires internet service providers to block reported piracy sites within 30 minutes. AGCOM insists that Cloudflare comply with these demands through its public DNS service, 1.1.1.1. When Cloudflare allegedly failed to do so, the regulator imposed a fine of over €14 million.
Sports conglomerates and their lobbying should kindly fuck off.
If they want to sue a site the old fashioned web for IP infringement that's fine. But that 30 minute thing is absolute bullshit.
Pirate sites are probably hosted in places where they can't really be sued.
> yield to a tech CEO from San Francisco
ahem, he's from Utah duh bro
They really should do this, this is the right and honorable thing to do instead of interfering with local governments and deriding of government organizations by their CEO.
I don't even agree with what the Italian government did, but more companies need to do this instead of lobbying for or against laws. No one elected you. The loud voice and influence you wield because of success as a commercial entity does not entitle you a louder voice and power than the citizens of that country. Pull out, if the Italian people don't like the result, they can work on getting things changed. They didn't vote for @eastdakota
Same goes for apple, google, microsoft, signal, twitter, etc.. I fear what all these have in common is the parasitical oligarchy in the US where companies, CEOs and billionaires puppeting the government with the string for everyone to see (what will anyone do about it?), and it doesn't even register for a moment that there is anything abnormal or harmful about it.
In a democracy, the person who controls popular opinion is the ultimate ruler. That person is supposed to be other citizens as individuals.
> That person is supposed to be other citizens as individuals
It’s been known since the ancient Greeks democracy results in oligarchy. It’s why the US was setup as a republic.
Exercise to the reader why everyone thinks democracy is an unassailable good in the world.
> They really should do this, this is the right and honorable thing to do instead of interfering with local governments and deriding of government organizations by their CEO.
plus it will kill their company forever across Europe
DO IT!
(and if the Italians are worried about the olympics, just wait a month and then do it)
Europe needs to stop relying anything on US corporations. The politicians still did not get the memo - Trump and the TechBros declared de-facto war. This is the antithesis of a free market.
Edit: Actually, Cloudflare may have an indirect point in that I also think that access to information should be free. Nonetheless this still does not invalidate what Europe SHOULD do. But the politicians in the EU are not very clever, so ...
[dead]
[flagged]
You mean Cloudflare should implement the system that lets Italian government block any website in 30 minutes, with no judicial review of any kind? The very same system that has been known to have false positives?
I'll just have to disagree with you here.
> Cloudflare is being forced to censor content based on requests that have not been judicially reviewed.
Why do you think Italy is the good guy here?
[flagged]
Nah, sports broadcasters and organizations shouldn't get special veto privileges on the internet.
How would you solve banning of pirated live streams of matches? Do you believe every event should be accessible for free to anyone?
Content "piracy" is a service delivery problem. Case in point: Valve's Steam + the fall of game piracy.
Okay, very interesting, go on.
Why?
MitM racket issues Italy an ultimatum.
This captcha huckster has delusions of grandeur.
Cloudflare needs to be very careful here. If they go scorched earth and the Olympics aren't impacted due to last-minute efforts, all future contracts will be taking a hard look at their competition.