alt Hacker NewsNot a good look on that guy to list his "pro-bono" services and threaten to pull them while asking JD Vance for his help.
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?
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I'm a team lead in an American organization that relies heavily on Cloudflare's Project Galileo[1], and I read that post with growing dread. My first thought was that this guy doesn't sound very much like a CEO. Let me rephrase that: He sounds like the kind of unhinged CEO of orgs I try to stay away from (X, for instance).
Then I read what you're talking about:
> [...] we are considering the following actions: [...] 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.
It is not unrealistic at all. The Olympics are run by politicians, essentially, since they appoint the committees, make the investments, build the infrastructure.
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.
> Not a good look on that guy to list his "pro-bono" services and threaten to pull them while asking JD Vance for his help.
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.
It seems the panel that fined him is politically appointed so seems reasonable to reach for politics to attempt to fight/resolve it.
He replies to an Italian user
> 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?
Politics tends to work that way.
Is there some more context then the original post? All I see is CF CEO saying that Vance agrees with the idea that these laws are bad.
Was with him in the first part, then wtf. Vance and the others dont stand for free speech either, it's only their own speech that matters and they'll proudly ban anything else.
1. Vance built a lot of support in Silicon Valley.
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.
Cloudflare really is all in on "we happily host pirate sites and tada, they're not in your country so we'll do nothing about it at all."
Exactly, his whole tirade felt extraordinarily far fetched, sketchy if not outright racist.
This is taking place in a larger geopolitical context. He is applying whatever pressure that Cloudflare can apply on its own (not much), and he mentions Vance as a way to call for US administration help at a time when the US is entering an open economic conflict with Europe. Tech and speech regulation is a central feature of that conflict.
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.