alt Hacker NewsI'm Italian, and as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist, I find hard to empathize with Cloudflare, especially after this tweet.
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.
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Another italian here; while this whole situation is bad and piracy shield is definitely not the solution, having the cloudflare CEO that threatens to remove free-tier service makes me wonder. They offer a free pill, just to be the "powerful" guys that threaten people when they are paying some million euros.
Well done my friend. :-) I'm already moving websites off cloudflare. bye!
P.S: I believe piracy shield is a s*t idea naturally.
Cloudflare is clearly in the right. Global censorship from an unaccountable cabal is a moral wrong. There's no sense in which Italy somehow 'wins' here, because even if they win, they lose.
Well considering the fine is larger than their profits in Italy, why on earth would they keep doing business there?
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
> 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.
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.
What happens when BunnyCDN finds itself in the same situation?
The free offerings are not a loss-leader in the conventional sense of anticipating future upsell. They are a traffic generator used to drive up Cloudflare’s leverage when negotiating peering with carriers & service providers, in order to drive down the marginal cost of bandwidth for Cloudflare’s actual product, the enterprise DDoS protection, with the criticality of traffic interchange expenses being evident in the vehemence with which Cloudflare discuss peering matters, such as via the astroturf’d “bandwidth alliance” grouping they sponsor.
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.
> 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.
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.
"he's technically in the wrong for not abiding to the law"
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
My conspiracy theory is that the EU is actively trying to create their own cloud through regulation after seeing the economic success from china's internet companies after the great firewall.
>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
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.
First off, the immediate appeal to Vance and Musk is embarrassing.
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.
Really?
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???
> i’m italian
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.
> I believe he knows he's technically in the wrong for not abiding to the law,
Free speech loses when people answer to critics of a speech limiting law that they should just follow it.
I also didn't enjoy the bit where, after saying the EU was against what Italy is doing, then blames the whole continent of Europe for this policy...and then inflicting it on the UK, which despite brexit, is still in Europe
> 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.
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.