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Italian here.
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.
Also another Italian here. For context, the "Piracy Shield" mentioned in the order is basically a legislative hacksaw authorized by the regulator (AGCOM) primarily to protect Serie A football rights. Soccer rules Italy more than the Vatican..
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.
> 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.
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 have to say I'm curious over whether that's actually leverage or a massively miscalculated threat that is just going to push the Italian population and politicians firmly against cloudflare.
I'm pretty sure if you tried that here (Canada) it would do the latter.
By DangitBobby 2026-01-104:251 reply Would a regulating body in Canada do this, though? And if so, hopefully Cloudflare would say fuck you just the same as they did Italy. It's nice to see someone actually taking a principled stand for once.
If our politicians were stupid enough to pass a law telling them to - I sure hope so - we live in a place with the rule of law not the rule of whatever Joe at the CRTC thinks should happen. Regulators exist to enforce the will of parliament...
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.
By DangitBobby 2026-01-104:472 reply You're free to believe all that. "Rule of Law" loses all meaning when corruption takes root. We don't like that "for my friends, everything, for everyone else, the law" shit.
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.
By gpm 2026-01-105:40 "for my friends, everything, for everyone else, the law" is a weird description, when that's not the problem with this law at all. There's no question of selective enforcement going on here. The problem is lack of due process, not that.
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".
> It's your civic duty to determine when upholding the law degrades you and every else more than following it does.
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.
By eecc 2026-01-108:30 If a foreign power takes over your country and changes the laws in ways that conflict with the previous constitution, there’s a break in sovereignty continuity so your options are: 1. Pledge to the new authority and move on 2. Keep your word on your previous pledge and resist
Not a fan of Cloudfare but why should it be responsible for providing pro bono services to the Italian government during the winter olympics?
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.
The services aren't pro bono if they're only offered in exchange for getting a law modified.
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.
By toyg 2026-01-1020:55 There was no exchange implied... before this sentence. Cloudflare might well be justified in feeling that the other side altered the deal, so to speak.
I have to doubt that it would push the populace against the company when the company is actually both providing good (free protection, DDOS mitigation, CyberSec) and supporting appropriate judicial process to make decisions.
Political threats of withdrawing from an event in an explicit attempt to pressure the country is the opposite of supporting appropriate judicial process.
By tonyhart7 2026-01-107:15 so you want cloudflare to pay fines that 2x revenue of italy customer while also demand cloudflare for services it provides ?????
not counting that the fines also outrageous, 2% global revenue and IP+Domain block for global despite it only Italy request it ????
Is this some weird variant of the right-wing claim that freedom of association is “censorship”? Why would a government be entitled to free shit?
By tsimionescu 2026-01-1011:33 No one is entitled to free shit, but anyone who says "I'll stop giving you free shit unless you do X" is not giving you free shit, they're engaging in barter. And bartering to try to change a law, just like paying to change a law, is obvious and illegal corruption.
By rerdavies 2026-01-106:18 Pretty sure, speaking as a Canadian, that the Canadian government would not be able to implement that kind of legislation. And that if they did, I would 100% back Cloudflare.
This is one of the consequences of outsourcing this (and other capabilities) to the private sector.
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.
By miki123211 2026-01-104:183 reply Governments just can't come to grips with how much money software engineers make.
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.
By tsimionescu 2026-01-1011:374 reply > 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."
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).
By sehansen 2026-01-1411:55 Maybe not junior engineers, but it's quite common to make more than $100k in Denmark nowadays. According to the Danish Society of Engineers[0], the median salary for a CS Bachelor graduating in 2025 was 51 000 DKK / month, which is $95 000 USD / year. The average raise received by a privately employed Danish engineer was 5% last year[1], so you'd expect to reach $100k with two years experience.
And, to support miki123211's point, the Danish government has had continuing problems hiring software engineers for the past decade, leading to a number of IT scandals.
0: https://studerende.ida.dk/english/about-to-graduate/salary/s... 1: https://ida.dk/om-ida/nyt-fra-ida/solide-loenstigninger-til-...
By alberto-m 2026-01-110:11 > in Switzerland they might see such salaries, at the higher tiers
Putting UK and Switzerland in the same pot is wrong, the pay scales are totally different. 100k$ is 80k CHF which is entry level salary for a SWE. The difference between Switzerland and US is at senior level (reaching 160k CHF is much more difficult than reaching 200k$).
By miki123211 2026-01-1017:351 reply The figures I gave were in-line with the US (as that's what most of this audience understands), but if you scale everything by a certain factor, the entire principle holds basically anywhere.
By tsimionescu 2026-01-1017:47 Not really. US programming salaries are much higher than most other engineering and specialist positions, which makes it harder for the government to hire good programmers.
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.
And they get exactly what they pay for. There's zero reason for a competent professional to stick around with that kind of pay any longer than strictly necessary (aka until their own gig or freelancing takes off).
By angry_octet 2026-01-1014:50 Many people don't want to live in America. I know that if you're American that sounds crazy.
Not just governments, that same kind of greed exists in private companies too.
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.
By Imustaskforhelp 2026-01-1016:121 reply This might explain why there are sooooooooo many vps providers/cloud providers, this might be one valid reason as to why.
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.
By Nextgrid 2026-01-1016:25 I said this in jest as a reaction to what post-tax SWE salaries in Europe top out at, all while the same companies have no problem burning insane money on vendors. There is zero incentive to do good work as an employee as it won't be compensated anywhere near what even a shoddy vendor gets paid.
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.
By debugnik 2026-01-1012:36 > Paying a junior employee $100k?
In Southern Europe? More like $30k gross.
How is revoking pro bono work you volunteered 'wild'? Should offering services lock you into indentured servitude?
By account42 2026-01-1215:41 There is a difference of stopping a free service (for whatever reason) and threatening to stop a free service if the other party doesn't do what they want.
By retr0rocket 2026-01-101:13 [dead]
> Kind of wild that a private company has that kind of power
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.
By nl 2026-01-105:47 What are the exact political views the Cloudflare is pushing here?
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.
By johncolanduoni 2026-01-104:081 reply They're threatening to take their ball and go home. If they move all of their operations out of Italy, under what principle does Italy demand they block content globally? Should Wikipedia remove their page on Tiananmen Square because the Chinese government demands it (which they would, if they thought it would work)?
By randomNumber7 2026-01-1016:29 The Chinese are smart enough to realize how evil you look if you ask for s.th. like that.
i think it’s quite normal and always have been normal for companies to leave countries when the regulative environment goes against them.
By account42 2026-01-1215:43 Most of them are not as brazen as putting "change your laws or here is how we will fuck you over" in a tweet.
I can assure you that a lot of Italians agree with Cloudflare on this topic.
By iamkonstantin 2026-01-1012:26 I think the parent is trying to say that whatever issues Italy may have internally, it's not up to Cloudflare to comment or enact solutions on their own.
By staplers 2026-01-104:19
This has always been the case in the western world, even before America itself existed. Some use the US govt (CIA) as leverage but often will just do it themselves.a private US company pushing their current political views on another sovereign stateBy davidguetta 2026-01-1120:53 They push nothing, they push back on retarded decision. Italy is not even a real market for them
By atmosx 2026-01-107:57 > but the idea of Cloudflare integrating with a broken 30-minute takedown API is dead on arrival.
Why? Technically it’s very easy. Wha if JDV asked CloudFlare to implement this on a different occasion? Would it be dead on arrival?
A system like this could actually work as long as every takedown request involves posting a significant bond into a holding account and where the publisher can challenge the block and claim the bond if the block is ruled illegal.
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).
By mercutio2 2026-01-1017:43 This is one of the very few non-money-laundering use cases for crypto.
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 don't get how censorship of this kind is even technically feasible?
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.
By mlrtime 2026-01-1012:33 Which stream, asking for a friend :)
By Imustaskforhelp 2026-01-1016:14 Can they not block your AWS account though?
Italy can also buy the bluff and you know, partner with an EU company to provide them the service Cloudflare would offer "for free".
There is no “EU” company with remotely the same network capacity or capability, in general
BunnyCDN is a good contender for the network. They can find another provider for cybersec.
By lgeek 2026-01-107:21 BunnyCDN don't run their own network, most of their servers are hosted at DataPacket(.com), but they use some other hosting companies too.
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.
Can someone report a bunch of government websites and legal streaming services and see what happens?
Only right owners can report websites, the Piracy Shield is essentially a tool in the hands of “Serie A Soccer League” and DAZN.
By mlrtime 2026-01-1012:36 I'm always reminded of this: https://youtu.be/y9SygP4BDxE?si=DoulFlfNWlGrDxnW&t=185
"Just look at me, tell me I'm not Kramer"
By wmf 2026-01-103:48 I'm sure they have a preexisting relationship with AGCOM.
By SkiFire13 2026-01-1010:19 They aren't
By easyThrowaway 2026-01-0918:351 reply I just want to point out that AGCOM once decided to put out an "Economically Relevant Instagram Influencers Register".
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").
If we truly want to point out the ridiculousness of Italian tech regulations, the influencers' registry, the temporary ChatGPT ban from a few years back or even the new AI regulations cannot hold a candle to the 22-year-old war on... arcade games.
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.
By badsectoracula 2026-01-0919:43 I guess they were inspired by a very similar law in Greece from 2002[0] where in an attempt to outlaw illegal gambling done in arcades a poorly written law outlawed all games (the article mentions it was in was in public places but IIRC the law was for both public and private and the government pinky promised that they'll only act on public places). I remember reading that some internet cafes were raided by the police too :-P.
An arcade stuck in the early 00s would be my ideal third space though.
Have you seen Arcade Time Capsule? It is very accurate recreation of a classic arcade with games you can actually play if you provide the ROMs.
Not the OP, but I tried it when it came out. VR headset technology wasn't good enough for screens within screens and it was nauseating more than anything.
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.
The quest 3 is good enough and the Galaxy XR is incredibly high resolution. But it isn't a really ideal way to play arcade ROMs for long term but just to enjoy the nostalgia.
How is the Galaxy XR? I want one but I can't justify it if it doesn't connect to my non-Samsung work laptop.
By UltraSane 2026-01-1016:41 I got it for $75 a month for two years. Visual clarity is incredible and monitor replacement level but comfort is meh so I bought studioform creative head strap which helped a lot. You can use Virtual Desktop to connect to any computer easily.
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.
By maartenscholl 2026-01-0922:00 Reminds me of US Pinball laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball#Relation_to_gambling
We live and have lived in a technological civilization for more than a hundred years. Legislators have NO EXCUSE to hide behind 'we don't understand the technology'. Sure computers are complex. But so are nuclear reactors, combustion engines and food safety.
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.
By UomoNeroNero 2026-01-110:15 This! Cazzo
By tjwebbnorfolk 2026-01-0917:561 reply > a law was created without verifying how the implementation of such law would work in practice (something very common in Italy)
To be fair to Italy, this happens everywhere quite frequently. In my country (the US) we do this all too often.
Except that in the common law system of the United States, a judge can throw out the regulation.
By arlort 2026-01-106:46 That's very much not the difference between common and civil law
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
By bobmcnamara 2026-01-0918:08 > So, I'm not sure anybody verified that what the right holders claimed was actually true.
Yup, this will be weaponized by the MPAA/RIAA
Wait, so is this about censorship, or about copyright?
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...
By subsistence234 2026-01-0919:281 reply There's no accountability or due process. According to this brilliant law, if some crony with write-privilege adds your website to a list, the whole world has to ban your website within 30 minutes no questions asked.
Germany has an equivalent within the CUII, which is also a censorship branch of the government with no judicial oversight.
By riedel 2026-01-0920:54 Judicial oversight took a while in Germany, but it is there now (but I guess you will always find an incompetent judge if you really want). I wonder if cloudflare would implement the German blocklist now that we have judicial oversight. Currently it is as nice registry for pirating sites for anyone using 1.1.1.1 [1]
That overstates things somewhat.
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.
By nkmnz 2026-01-0921:04 You're completely on the wrong track here. The discussion is not about who does or doesn't control the courts, it's about the question if someone who's rights have been violated can go to court or not with regard to that specific matter. If a court rules that blocking an IP address is illegal, the access provider has to stop blocking it. Period.
The CUII does not need a verdict to enact censorship. Make of that what you will.
The police doesn't need a verdict to issue you a fine either. But you can challenge your fine (and your block) in court.
A fine doesn't cause immediate harm as you don't have to immediately pay it while you challenge it in court, having your IP or website blocked happens immediately and will continue harming you until it's decreted that it wasn't lawful.
By jacquesm 2026-01-1112:36 That depends on the country you are in. In some countries you have to pay anyway and then you get it back if you win the court case. And they're banking on you not challenging the fine because the fees for the court case will exceed the fine so you lose either way.
Challenging the IP bans in Italy is stupidly hard. Your VM gets an IP address that was used a few months ago for soccer piracy? Too bad, you won't be able to access it from Italy.
By immibis 2026-01-103:04 Surely there's some EU trade barriers law about that
1. CCUI isn't even a government body
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.
2 is wrong. The CUII even blocks political activists because they dare to post their entire blocklist [1]
By waffleiron 2026-01-108:51 Read the post, they never blocked the activist. They just changed what they replied to a DNS query of an already blocked site to make it harder to detect.
Are you really countering an argument against censorship by a power abusing entity with another group famous for power abuse?
By jacquesm 2026-01-0922:24 No.
By yibg 2026-01-100:47 Sometimes it's hard to differentiate between the 2. In this case it sounds like copyright in name but the implementation is such that it's a big hammer that can also be used for censorship if followed.
It's about copyright. Seizing domain names (registered outside Italy of course) can't be done in 30 minutes which is what the football overlords want.
What is it with Southern Europe and the football overlords? Spain is blocking half the internet, Italy is fighting Cloudflare. What's up? Are football leagues big political donors?
By nathanlied 2026-01-0921:501 reply Football is extremely popular, and football clubs (and their owners) are quite influential (socially and politically). But it's a little bigger than that.
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...
Football, the clubs, are also major driver of money laundering. Dirty cash buys a lot of politicians.
https://www.comsuregroup.com/news/a-red-card-for-dirty-money...
By miki123211 2026-01-104:23 Yeah, in Europe, there tends to be an association between football fans and organized crime, just as there's one between unions and organized crime in the US.
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.
By hexbin010 2026-01-108:27 A company that would profit from more regulations arguing for more regulations. No way !
As usual, cronyism.
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?
By mlrtime 2026-01-1012:41 If this is true, and seems likely. There is some satisfaction seeing corrupt cronyism agencies getting slapped with a hard "NO" when they are used to getting what they want.
By HDThoreaun 2026-01-0922:04 Spain especially but southern europe in general has a really crappy economy. Soccer teams are some of the wealthiest organizations in these countries, which means theyre the ones who are able to fund politicians which means they can get laws passed.
By Fire-Dragon-DoL 2026-01-0921:291 reply No usually the political figures are football league owners.
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"
By matwood 2026-01-109:44 It's not just Italy. The UK is also insane along with some cities in Spain. In the UK one of the rivalries supposedly goes back to the War of the Roses [1].
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...
By immibis 2026-01-103:02 Those football leagues are run by the literal Mafia
By heraldgeezer 2026-01-0919:131 reply >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.
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.
By miki123211 2026-01-104:30 I recently learned that Poland literally has a law on the books[1] (from the executive, not the legislative), mandating our use of SOAP and WSDL. You're definitely right on that score. As far as I know, it's supported by some EU directive or other, no less.
[1] (Polish) https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=WDU20240...
So is this similar to the DCMA in the US, where there's a lot of iffyness about abuse and actually knowing that someone is actually a rights holder?
At least with DMCA you so get a notice and you can somewhat challenge it. With Italy's Piracy Shield you have no notice and there's no public record of which IPs/websited have been blocked, so it's hard to even challenge it in court.
By Nextgrid 2026-01-1013:07 Nothing prevents anyone from sending in a fake notice anonymously, which will still force any provider to take down your content until challenged.
By mlrtime 2026-01-1012:44 Not really, this is at a World level. Italy wants to ban an IP globally in 30 minutes.
DMCA take downs are domain specific with one provider. So scale is completely different here.
By kelvinjps10 2026-01-0919:251 reply Is this similar to what happened in Spain?
By ShowalkKama 2026-01-0919:421 reply yes, it's quite similar. They blocked some lawful services too such as google drive (yes, really) and a TON of sites behind cloudflare by blocking some of its IPs (it happened a while ago, it's not directly related to this).
By paganel 2026-01-0920:36 It's in a way related because this is also meant to combat "football streaming piracy", the same as in Spain. Idiot moves.
Also Italian. I think everybody sucks here?
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.
By NamlchakKhandro 2026-01-0918:509 reply But might does make rights.
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.
This is the Stephen Miller caveman view of the world, but it obviously doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than five seconds. It's a very straightforward consequence of refusing to ever admit you are wrong. "If I did it, then I must have had the right to do it."
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.
> The right to vote doesn't exist because you didn't have to defeat the entire army to vote against their leader,
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.
I am not saying it's impossible for rights to be taken away, I am arguing against this statement:
> 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.
>Would you agree that I therefore have no rights?
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.
By pmontra 2026-01-104:51 I believe that in this conversation one party is saying that people have intrinsic rights (see the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and the other party might agree on that but they say that those rights can be enforced only if they can be defended. Example: both parties probably agree that people have a right to free speech but nevertheless people end up in jail if they attempt free speech on the wrong subject in the wrong country.
By duskdozer 2026-01-1011:31 Philosophically, no. Practically, no, as long as someone desires and is able to defend them, otherwise yes.
By sumedh 2026-01-108:04 > but it obviously doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than five seconds.
Maduro would disagree.
By michaelt 2026-01-0922:45 > it obviously doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than five seconds. [...] It's just a refusal to accept the philosophical concept of rights.
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.
By dingnuts 2026-01-0919:31 [dead]
By unbecoming 2026-01-0920:19 [flagged]
By DangitBobby 2026-01-104:312 reply Refusing to accept the philosophical concept of rights is just correct. You are born with fuck all unless people have decided you are entitled to something by existing. Plenty of people were born without anything remotely resembling rights. If rights were inherent and not simple enforced by people, that wouldn't be the case, would it? Life isn't a fairy tail.
By svara 2026-01-108:39 Civilization is literally built on what you're saying being wrong.
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.
By burkaman 2026-01-1014:49 Yes, and people have decided I'm entitled to something by existing. That's what human society and civilization is built on. It's been true for the entire history of our species.
By throw0101d 2026-01-0920:14 > Because all it takes is men with guns to change what rights you think you have.
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...
By OkayPhysicist 2026-01-0920:21 You're conflating rights with freedoms, which is the same category error as confusing legality with morality.
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.
By Volundr 2026-01-0919:57 > If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights.
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.
race to the bottom logic
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.
By immibis 2026-01-0920:49 You might be conflating description with prescription.
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".
By throw310822 2026-01-0919:56 Ok. So a man with a gun has the right to shoot you and kill you. Then a policeman comes with a bigger gun and he has the right to kidnap the murderer. Then comes a judge with an even bigger gun (the law) and has the right to lock him up in a prison. But then the murderer gets hold of a weapon and he has the right to escape from prison. Etc.
You see that this view doesn't go very far.
By dragonwriter 2026-01-0919:561 reply Might can defend, or violate, rights, but it does not make them.
By DangitBobby 2026-01-104:36 What does make them? Children apparently don't have them, and many races in many countries didn't have them for a long time either. How do you account for that? Are we now distinguishing between "having" rights and uh... being allow to use them?
How are all those guns helping in the US right now, as it turns authoritarian?
I’m confused. I thought the guns were for stopping an authoritarian regime?
I'll cut the cheekiness, I disagree with a "authoritarian regime". I don't support everything, but to some up an entire government as "authoritarian regime" is wrong IMO.
So why would I use my guns again?
By lostlogin 2026-01-119:33 > to some up an entire government as "authoritarian regime" is wrong IMO
It doesn’t work like that though. The most authoritarian regime in the world has bits that seem benign, we don’t judge them on that.
We judge them based on the extremes. Things like masked men grabbing civilians off the street and shooting them in the face, with the full support of the regime.
By svara 2026-01-108:31 You can go back to the ancient Greeks to explain what is wrong about that.
Literally two thousand years of civilization were spent on combating the pockets in which people live by that principle.
> No, I'm not taking lessons in democracy from JD Vance, thank you very much
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.
And you are falling into the trap of thinking that if a person is busy deconstructing what used to be one of the larger democracies in the world that their other words are going to be taken at face value, which obviously is not going to happen.
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.
To be fair, he's not bringing them up as intellectual support for his argumentative base – he's bringing them up as support for acts of retaliation. This is mostly about power and we've lost 30% in power vs. the US in just ~12 years because we've fucked up our economy.
Maybe 'the economy' is not the only valid yardstick to compare countries by?
By nkmnz 2026-01-0922:15 I absolutely and 100% agree! But it's the stick that others will use to force their world view down your throat. So if you want to be not only righteous, but also hold others accountable according to your standards, you need the economic power to do so.
> we've lost 30% in power vs. the US in just ~12 years because we've fucked up our economy.
I wonder how many Americans would prefer to live in the US that existed 12 years ago versus the US today.
People will say anything online, but when it comes to action very little. I'd rather live in the US now or 12 years ago vs Italy unless someone gave me a tuscan villa with a pool
Virtue signaling at its finest.
I laughed. Im at a the tail end of 3 weeks in Italy, sitting on a train.
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.
By mlrtime 2026-01-1013:05 Oh I've been multiple times, it's beautiful! But vacationing is not living + working, paying bills, dealing with bureaucracy or culture clashes, etc...
By DangitBobby 2026-01-104:382 reply Most of our power loss is from electing a belligerent dumb fuck twice and allowing him to sabotage our international relationships and destroying our remaining credibility.
By nkmnz 2026-01-1016:37 I was speaking about Europe as a whole. Economically, we suck. Losing UK didn't help, either, but except for Poland, we've become relatively poorer by an insane amount, compared to the US. Another 10 years on that path and we're half the US.
By mlrtime 2026-01-1012:51 What power loss? OP is talking about Italian power loss?
> And you are falling into the trap of thinking that if a person is busy deconstructing what used to be one of the larger democracies in the world that their other words are going to be taken at face value, which obviously is not going to happen.
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?
That's besides the point: JD Vance and Musk are precisely the wrong entities to have opinions on stuff like this because they are on the wrong side of that line most of the time. Especially Musk, but Vance has his own ulterior motives to berate the EU on anything so regardless of the outcome it will be tainted.
> JD Vance and Musk are precisely the wrong entities to have opinions on stuff like this because they are on the wrong side of that line most of the time. Especially Musk, but Vance has his own ulterior motives to berate the EU on anything so regardless of the outcome it will be tainted.
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.
By mlrtime 2026-01-1012:52 >they are on the wrong side of that line most of the time.
To you, yes. Which shows your biases.
It has been very clear that the Trump adminstrations definition of freedom of speech, including JD Vance's, is that you should be free to say whatever the Trump administration wants and nothing else.
They have consistently prosecuted, threatened, deported, withheld money from, and so on people who say things they do not like.
And the answer to that is to point out the hypocrisy (what you're doing), not to take the opposite view, that censorship is important (what so many others are doing when Trump takes a position on anything).
By j-krieger 2026-01-1011:34 Yes! That is it!
Similar to what Democrats have done to Trump: https://nypost.com/2024/05/12/us-news/fareed-zakaria-doubts-...
By lostlogin 2026-01-1012:15 Do you really see it as the same scale?
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.
you are falling into the trap of ignoring the pandering. cloudflare bro is clearly pandering here and showing that, in the moment, he will say/do whatever to whomever to get what he wants. cloudflare kind of has a history of doing this.
there was zero reason to name drop vance and elon besides appealing to their rabid fans to bolster support.
it's just more hypocrisy.
By iamnothere 2026-01-0920:431 reply What other option do they have? It’s either comply with unjust rulings that undermine the free internet (and their business) or make a deal with the devil. Either one is bad but only complying has an immediate negative impact.
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.
By jacquesm 2026-01-0922:32 Cloudflare, the company that regularly blocks me from legitimately visiting websites because their bot detection software absolutely sucks probably is the biggest effective censor on the planet.
By subsistence234 2026-01-0919:421 reply [flagged]
Western Europe is not an authoritarian dystopia by any measure. Economic growth or lack of thereof is absolutely irrelevant here
> Western Europe is not an authoritarian dystopia by any measure
People are locked up in the Germany and the UK because they criticize the government, its politicians or their policies. I live in Germany.
Who is locked up for criticizing the government in Germany? You can be fined for insulting a government official, and I think it's a bad law and should be retracted, but a) insulting is not the same as criticizing and b) I've never heard of a single person locked up because of it - you'd basically need to deliberately refuse paying the fine for that
By j-krieger 2026-01-0921:21 188 Criminal Code Insult, defamation and slander directed against persons in political life[1]:
(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...
By immibis 2026-01-0920:52 Yanis Varoufakis, I think? Except he was banned from Germany, not locked up. If he tries to enter, then he might be locked up. They used the intermediate step of calling him a terrorist.
"UK police made over 12,000 arrests under laws criminalizing communications causing 'annoyance or anxiety,' with arrests rising 58% since 2019" [1]. Only 10% lead to a conviction. What then, is it, other than a government issuing arrests for speech?
[1]: https://evrimagaci.org/gpt/london-braces-for-free-speech-sho...
By jacquesm 2026-01-102:59 The vast bulk of those cases are about online harassment, usually against former spouses, public servants, etc. If you are aware of a case where an individual was arrested for just expressing their opinion you are welcome to provide the evidence. Until then this is just FUD. Censorship is bad, protecting the rest of the citizens from harassment is the kind of thing that is actually useful.
> Economic growth or lack of thereof is absolutely irrelevant here
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.
> 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 2011: ~1
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.
GDP, as it's measured right now, is mostly just measuring unreported inflation plus money printing.
Edit: Real wages are mostly measuring unreported inflation but not measuring money printing.
By nkmnz 2026-01-0920:59 I wont argue that those two things don't exist, but can you show some proof that GDP is measuring nothing else than ("just") those two things, and that there are meaningful differences between the EU and the US with regard to these two things? Is there no unreported inflation and no money printing in the EU? If that were true, we'd see massive devaluation of USD vs. EUR.
Also, if you don't like GDP, you can just look at real wages – same picture.
By tick_tock_tick 2026-01-0920:021 reply I mean they've certainly turned their back on classic western values like free speech and expression.
No? We've never had such an absolutist view on the freedom of speech as American Constitution holds. We still have enough of it to keep the political debate open to all points of view though (with a reservation for the paradox of tolerance)
By tick_tock_tick 2026-01-0920:211 reply > We still have enough of it to keep the political debate open to all points of view though (with a reservation for the paradox of tolerance)
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".
Noone is being jailed for speech in EU, you are misinformed by your antidemocratic elites. Incarceration rate in Germany is almost 10 times lower than in the US, and prison time is used for really severe cases, not for being mean on Twitter
By xinayder 2026-01-106:08 The AI generated art is also disgusting. Makes the CEO look like an angry kid because his multi-billion dolar industry got a 1% income fine, which is nothing for them, for a service they provide that keeps having outages because they have bad coders who thought moving their shit code to Rust was a good idea.
I would like to see a similar rant about the DMCA from US CEOs, which amounts to similar global effect. Not a great law but all this censorship stuff is bullshit.
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.
By resfirestar 2026-01-0923:34 To be fair big tech did do a full court press to stop site blocking when such a law (SOPA/PIPA) was proposed in the US, and they continue to oppose the MPA's attempts to get site blocking via the courts. DMCA on the other hand seems very broken, don't give the MPA the "3 strikes" regime they want and you get sued into the ground like Cox. I suspect tech CEOs don't complain about this because they don't want the same treatment.
By miki123211 2026-01-104:271 reply AFAIK, the DMCA doesn't require infrastructure providers (ISPs, DNS resolvers, "relay" services like Cloudflare) to block entire websites. It's just for surgical removals of content (and blocking of ISP / hosting provider customers who are notorious infringers).
The US doesn't have the kind of website blocking laws that many European countries have.
By riedel 2026-01-1010:47 If you look at those 'whole websites' it is nearly exclusively sites that do not comply with takedown requests regarding copyright (actually those blocking laws/procedures do mostly foresee any other reason). The question I was addressing is the judicial control and the abuse for censorship. DCMA takedown request are massively abused without any real judicial control. Sure you can fight those in court, but so you could fight ISP blocks. I thing the different methods simply stem from a different legal system with different types of fines (particularly in civil law)
By Karuhanga 2026-01-1013:09 I agree with this sentiment. His tweet was quite disingenuous and it doesn’t help that he’s tagging Musk and Vance. The noise they make about free speech is a charade.
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.
By rcastellotti 2026-01-0919:19 se non del tutto giusto, quasi niente sbagliato :)
By mcintyre1994 2026-01-109:441 reply He says that JD Vance and Elon Musk believe in free speech, so I’m inclined to conclude that he’s far beyond reason.
By mlrtime 2026-01-1012:45 And I think that when you are so far biased in one direction there is nothing these two could do to alter your opinion in anyway. Thus making it irrelevant to the discussion.
By anthem2025 2026-01-0922:42 Why would you be inclined to think that?
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.
I also wonder why he felt emboldened to escalate like this. Maybe he thinks Italy is so small it can be slapped around by a rage post on Twitter?
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?
> There's a DNS blocklist from media industry applied by German ISPs
By the CUII with no judicial oversight. German organizations like the CCC and free speech activists very much hate that this is a thing.
Posting it a hundred times doesn't make your claim more correct. If your rights are infringed, you can always go to court. If you think you being blocked from accessing certain information is an infringement of Art. 2 Abs. 1 GG ("Every person shall have the right to free development of his personality [...]"), you can drag this to The Federal Constitutional Court.
No I can't, since I lack the monetary funds. My claim stands correct, going to the federal constitutional court is expensive enough that many people are barred from that option. My claim stands correct - no judicial verdict is needed for the CUII to censor websites. Don't believe me. Believe the activists [1].
[1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-cuii-wie-konzerne-heimlich-webse...
new comment: you're so wrong that not even the opposite of your statement would be true. CUII is a private body, but it forces its members to go to court before they ask CUII to initiate a block:
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.
By bflesch 2026-01-0920:06 Yes, I didn't want to say it is a good thing.
If the German filters only apply to ISPs in Germany, they have no effect on users in foreign countries. Moreover, Cloudflare is obviously not an ISP.
the filters the Italian authorities complain about also only apply in italy.
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.
By Root_Denied 2026-01-0922:321 reply > 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.
The difference is that Imgur/4chan have no presence in the UK but Cloudflare has servers and probably a sales office in Italy. Cloudflare does have to follow Italian law within Italy.
Either Cloudflare can block pirate sites or ISPs will completely block Cloudflare (as seen in Spain). Which way do you prefer?
By Root_Denied 2026-01-1422:38 As I understand it Cloudflare is being asked to block these sites globally, and what I said was that Italy doesn't have the legal authority to request that CF do so globally.
Locally, within Italy I can see the argument that CF can be compelled to adhere to blocking sites for any requests originating from, or being routed to Italy - so long as Cloudflare maintains any kind of presence there. That goes for any other country, too.
Realistically maintaining this kind of work puts a financial and engineering overhead on Cloudflare (or any CDN) for running operations in that country, and that incentivizes Cloudflare to push back on this request from any country. The logical response from CF is to refuse and threaten to remove all operations from the country if the country tries to force the issue, to prevent CF from getting pulled into the same requirements for multiple other countries, which is exactly what CF did a couple days ago.
I'll reiterate my previous stance - if a country wants to block part of the internet, that country needs to do it themselves and for the space within which they have authority to do so (their borders). At that point it's up to the citizens of the country to push back if they disagree, and if they don't want to be compared to China and their Great Firewall they shouldn't try and regulate the internet.
By blibble 2026-01-0918:42 > The Italian authority argues that they have the skills to do a local block
they certainly do, they have the source IP and their platform lets them geolocate an ip
Do you think the Italian bureaucrats really want to ban something in France or Germany?
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.
By tick_tock_tick 2026-01-0920:03 > Do you think the Italian bureaucrats really want to ban something in France or Germany?
Yes 100% they absolutely do.
No, in fact I think most in US tech are awfully ignorant about Europe. That's why I explicitly brought it up. Just because we Europeans can speak your language doesn't mean that people from the US understand how our countries work. And most US tech companies are located in Ireland in a small US expat bubble.
By cubefox 2026-01-0919:24 You are presumably also not an Italian, so I don't know why you would know more about Italy than he just because you are European. I'm also European, and I certainly don't thereby know more about Italy than about, say, the US.
By monsieurbanana 2026-01-0918:18 Or he perfectly understands what they meant but chose to create artificial outrage. "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity" has not aged well in 2026
I'm pretty sure Cloudflare is an ISP according to German law ("Diensteanbieter" according to DDG). You might confuse "ISP" with the terminology of "Access Provider" according to the (now defunct) §8 TMG.
If that were true, sci-hub.se would be blocked in Germany on 1.1.1.1 (1dot1dot1dot1.cloudflare-dns.com), it isn't blocked, therefore it's not true. (Modus tollens)
Your reasoning is impeccable, bravo. But it's wrong. Both your premise and your conclusion are based on completely wrong assumptions.
Not sure which premise you disagree with, but the conclusion follows from them.
I am a Service Provider ("Diensteanbieter") according to DDG and I don't block a single page, which makes your statement not only wrong, but rather so wrong that not even the complete opposite would make any sense.
By carlosjobim 2026-01-0918:29 What is the escalation? Cloudflare or any company is free to stop doing business in any country which mistreats them or doesn't align with their interest. How can you interpret this in some way as Cloudflare being the aggressor? They don't owe the nation of Italy anything.
By dependsontheq 2026-01-109:4523 reply Let's be a bit more honest here, I think the Italian law is badly defined, but I also think the american perspective is wrong.
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 are under daily attack from Russian accounts
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.
By throw__away7391 2026-01-1014:14 This is the entire problem. This is possibly the single problem in the modern world. When social media first appeared, "feeds" were based on explicit subscription by the users and ordered chronologically. Later "likes" were added, but this was still based on deliberate user behavior and simple deterministic sorting while the ability to "repost" greatly expanded the reach of individual posts, later algorithms were introduced then the number of signals expanded beyond explicit user input to implicit engagement measures. Each step along this path has taken agency away from individuals.
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.
> 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.
By ndsipa_pomu 2026-01-1017:25 I'm sure there's examples of non-US media companies pushing ragebait and similar. e.g. from the UK, there's BBC, Telegraph, Daily Mail, local news sites etc.
It's a perverse incentive that in chasing engagement, the ragebait is selected for.
By RuslanL 2026-01-1022:34 Do we have comparable European companies though?
Isn't that just "culture"? Let the best content win? It used to be that the USA was comfortable competing and winning along these lines.
By furyofantares 2026-01-1019:541 reply If you tautologically define "best" as "that which wins", sure.
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.
By JumpCrisscross 2026-01-1020:471 reply > If you tautologically define "best" as "that which wins", sure
Spot on. By OP’s metric, we should shift all agricultural and pharmaceutical production to heroin.
By woooooo 2026-01-115:47 I've seen some straw-men in my day but "OP wants to shift all agricultural production to heroin" might be an all-timer.
By Imustaskforhelp 2026-01-1015:401 reply Yes (sort of), but the definition of best has changed so drastically built on completely different benchmarks (engagement)
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
Ok, but are we losers who cannot compete culturally? Where's the faith and confidence? We can't compete with AI slop?
Can broccoli compete with heroin? Why don't we offer people both and see what they like better? Let them compete! Give people choice!
By CWuestefeld 2026-01-1017:391 reply Who gets to decide where to draw the line?
By s1mplicissimus 2026-01-1316:42 Well when I grew up in the early days of the internet, the plan was to have it decided by a democratically elected government that acts in good faith.
Since that didn't seem to work I'm kinda out of ideas as well
Setting aside the bad analogy, real people are much more likely to eat broccoli than to do heroin.
By darubedarob 2026-01-1018:18 [dead]
By CrzyLngPwd 2026-01-1010:569 reply Well, we cry "freedom of speech" when Russia/China/adversary shuts our propaganda-pushing media or tools out.
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.
Free speech for the individuals is needed, in terms of people should not be punished for what they say. But social media platforms owned by foreign countries is a danger for any democracy. There's a reason the US wants to capture Tiktok, Iran is shutting down the internet, and China has The Great Firewall.
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.
By Imustaskforhelp 2026-01-1015:43 There is a big difference between danger for democracy because of these addiction farming Social media platforms with propaganda and something like piracy as well though.
By vouwfietsman 2026-01-1014:383 reply > I'm an adult, and I can decide for myself.
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.
So who gets to decide? Someone who is above influence? Who is that?
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".
By Barrin92 2026-01-1021:17 There has to be nuance yes. But the nuanced position starts with accepting the reality that a ton of people are indeed having their brain turned to goo. Just go outside of the bubble of somewhat tech literate highly educated young people and look at what 60+ year olds consume on Facebook.
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.
By GoblinSlayer 2026-01-1015:16 Doubtful.
By scrollaway 2026-01-1011:092 reply > 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.
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.
into complete autocracy & dictatorship....ummm you mean a democratically elected president & government? Plus these hyperboles don't really resonate anymore as they've been used for every little thing people don't like. It's still a democracy even if you don't like the outcome.
By scrollaway 2026-01-1012:294 reply [flagged]
By mattmaroon 2026-01-1013:112 reply “ The most famous dictatorship of the previous century was also democratically elected.”
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.
No, actually, through a campaign of propaganda that wasn't stopped.
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
By marcosdumay 2026-01-1014:37 > propaganda that wasn't stopped
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.
By scrollaway 2026-01-1015:28 It took many steps, not just a convenient on-topic one. And among those many steps, the US has taken most of them at this stage.
By amarcheschi 2026-01-1013:022 reply Mussolini introduced women suffrage, I'm not joking.
However, a few months after he deleted elections
By andsoitis 2026-01-1914:45 > Mussolini introduced women suffrage, I'm not joking.
No single person introduced women suffrage. It emerged through independent movements across different countries.
That said, it is generally accepted that New Zealand (1893) was the first self-governing country to grant women the right to vote nationally. Key figure: Kate Sheppard.
Earlier partial or local suffrage: Sweden 1718 - 1772 (limited), US 1869 (Wyoming territory).
Key global leaders of women suffrage: UK - Emmeline Pankhurst, US - Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth C Stanton (results in 19th Amendment)
Global timeline: 1893 New Zealand, 1902 Australia (with racial exceptions), 1913 - 1918 Nordics, 1918 - 1920 UK and US, 1945-1960s Much of Asia, Africa, and Middle East, 1971 Switzerland!
By scrollaway 2026-01-1013:05 Reminds me of that time I implemented multithreading in an app we shut down a month later.
By GoblinSlayer 2026-01-1018:371 reply >USA currently threatening to seize land from a sovereign EU nation with pro-MAGAs justifying it at every step
That EU nation can join NATO to prevent it.
By scrollaway 2026-01-111:37 Denmark already is in NATO, smartypants.
By csoups14 2026-01-1014:13 > That's what it was
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.
By scrollaway 2026-01-1013:25 [flagged]
By GoblinSlayer 2026-01-1015:551 reply >What the actual fuck do we do to defend ourselves, pray tell?
Delete smartphone, logout from abusive SaaS.
By scrollaway 2026-01-1017:34 So, putting your head in the sand and pretending the world doesn't keep turning?
Deleting X (which I've done) doesn't stop Russia from influencing the voterbase of my neighbouring countries. Now what?
By intended 2026-01-1011:25 The current methods of subverting speech involve the opposite of control.
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.
By tootie 2026-01-111:18 What about spam? Spam is absolutely protected free speech. Nobody bats an eye at aggressive censorship of spam. We've had the US Congress pass bills restricting spam. Should we overturn all of that and let the spammers have absolute freedom?
By sambuccid 2026-01-115:31 But let's be honest, right now it's big tech with their algorithm that's deciding for you. Of course you are still free to find the content you want (unlike what would happen with banning) but most people minds can be influenced by the political view of who owns the platform if they wish to do so.
Maybe a bit of this is already happening (obvious suspect being X) or maybe not, I guess we'll never know for sure, but there is clearly an huge issue here that needs fixing as soon as possible.
Because freedom of speech was always a misguided creed at best.
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.
What rules can you possibly have that distinguish the expert and the manipulator in all cases, without abuse?
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.
I think the solution is to elect a commission of experts to be deciding this. Term limits. Separate independent institution from the government - no meddling.
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.
By lucianbr 2026-01-1019:34 Elect by the people at large? People who voted for Trump and such? What's the point in an elected institution separated from the government - the government is already elected, and people will mostly vote for candidates from the same parties in all elections.
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.
By TylerLives 2026-01-1018:341 reply And who will watch the watchdogs?
By saubeidl 2026-01-1019:56 The electorate.
By mrec 2026-01-1013:58 > The speech of the manipulator is not the same as the speech of the expert
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.
>American free speech extremists like these tech CEOs
well, claim to be free speech extremists at least
By saubeidl 2026-01-1013:34 Indeed. I think with some of the more government-aligned oligarchs it's more of a pretense to enable said information warfare.
By joebe89 2026-01-1016:06 These tech CEOs just want to have to spend as little as possible to maintain their platforms. They don't actually care about freedom of speech beyond that.
> Well, we cry "freedom of speech" when Russia/China/adversary shuts our propaganda-pushing media or tools out.
That "cyring" must have been awfully quiet, I didn't hear anything at least.
By azangru 2026-01-1014:27 I don't know if any of the links below will count as crying; but here are some, from the British media reporting on Russia:
- 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/b0003arzaBy drysine 2026-01-1014:29 "The EU condemns the totally unfounded decision by the Russian authorities to block access to over eighty European media in Russia.
This 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...
> I don't want my politicians deciding
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.
By bmelton 2026-01-1016:30 A lot of people naively interject "But we're not a democracy, we're a Republic!" at arguments where it has no real bearing, but _here_ it does.
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.
By GoblinSlayer 2026-01-1015:25 It's not obvious that democracy implies autocracy.
By kamma4434 2026-01-1012:18 That would be a political perspective. But what we are discussing now is some very rich football clubs who have a right to filter anything on the internet because they say so.
By user____name 2026-01-1018:30 This kind of "epistemic collapse" via propaganda is an established method of subverting nation states, Russia has been doing it for decades.
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.
I think this is moving the goal post. Cloudflare isn't challenging the need to restrict access to some websites, it is challenging who has the right to decide. Quoting the tweet:
> 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.
By bambax 2026-01-1015:07 Bureaucrats are a problem, but they're eventually accountable to the people. Companies are accountable to shareholders located in another country, who don't give a damn about whatever so long as the money keeps coming. I choose bureaucrats against businessmen anytime.
By Imustaskforhelp 2026-01-1015:32 I am not on any social media so I don't even know what the propaganda is that you are talking about but there are ways to really filter out youtube in such a way (by following unbiased media houses) and I haven't seen much propaganda on youtube (I think)
> 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.
By Saline9515 2026-01-1012:45 Russian bots and subversive propaganda in general take hold when the quality and diversity of the media decreases, which leads citizens to listen to alternative narratives.
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.
By fc417fc802 2026-01-1011:042 reply How is Cloudflare refusing to comply with DNS censorship even remotely related to propaganda campaigns conducted by the geopolitical opponent of your personal choosing?
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?
By Karuhanga 2026-01-1012:52 I think the upside is drawing a line in the sand now before they tighten requests any further and (maybe) not losing the revenue from some genuinely illegal pirating services that use them.
By fc417fc802 2026-01-1011:37 Well, yeah, I suppose that on occasion a view expressed by an American could happen to overlap with the propaganda of any given geopolitical adversary. Similar to the principle of a broken clock being right twice a day.
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.
By mattmaroon 2026-01-1012:542 reply The problem with this argument, and why free speech absolutism is the only stance that makes sense, is that someone always has a good reason why you need to throw the bathwater out right now, baby be dammed.
The end result is worse than the disinformation.
By tootie 2026-01-111:15 Free speech absolutism is not necessary at all. We can be thoughtful about it. Think about the American criminal justice system and the criminal culpability standard of "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt". We have the concept of being "reasonable" at the core of our justice system for centuries and it works far more often than it fails. And certainly no one has come up with anything better.
I'm also reminded of the last time Matthew Prince was locked in the horns of a free speech issue when there was outcry for Cloudflare to stop platforming Daily Stormer and Kiwi Farms. Sites that were claiming their free speech rights to not only spread hate, but to doxx and threaten and, by extension, chill the speech of people they disliked. Hence, free speech is not unlimited. Some speech restricts the speech of others. And then it is very much the responsibility of regulators to step in and make a judgment.
How do you know the end result is worse than disinformation? If the Russian disinformation allow Russia to destroy the freedom and democracy in Europe, and allow Russia to take over, that seems to me to much worse than limiting the publication of lies and slander.
By mattmaroon 2026-01-1013:342 reply Because whoever gets to determine what lies and slander are become your new dictators.
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.
Hear me out, but: You can elect a commission of experts to be deciding this. Term limits. Separate independent institution from the government.
That's not a dictator. You're just grasping for hyperbole to prop up an ideological point.
By mattmaroon 2026-01-1013:441 reply It’s called a jury. We have those. They’re the commission that determines if something is slander.
Something doesn't need to be slander to be information warfare. We need something much larger scale and more powerful to fight back the hybrid warfare from Russia and increasingly also the US.
By mattmaroon 2026-01-1018:02 Is it possible that that belief is itself influenced by the propaganda you’re worried about? If I were Russia I’d do my best to create a rift between the US and Europe.
By ako 2026-01-1013:59 Freedom is a scale, not binary. I'm willing to move a bit on that scale to avoid going completely to one of the opposites. I completely disagree with your suggestion that if you don't have complete freedom, you're at the complete opposite end, I.e. zero freedom.
By ThinkBeat 2026-01-1014:22 The west have had various forms for this since before the internet, and certainly have huge efforts similar to what you list above, but have in general been far more productive than bots from the other side.
By abc123abc123 2026-01-1011:284 reply WTF? How are you attacked by russian accounts? This childish notion of thinking that only "true" thoughts are allowed under free speech, and the rest must be eradicated needs to die.
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.
By vladvasiliu 2026-01-1011:58 While I agree with your sentiment, it's more and more clear to me that reality doesn't reflect it. Many people are extremely easily influenced by easy to digest soundbites.
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.
By robinkek 2026-01-1012:04 We don't have freedom of speech for its own sake because of some inherent good. We have it because it's a useful tool to get other peoples perspectives and allows us come to more realistic conclusions where most feel included. People paid by the chinese or russian government are in complete opposition to that spirit.
By bluescrn 2026-01-1016:19 Note that it's always a claim of Russian (or maybe Chinese) propaganda. Never middle-eastern propaganda.
The level of radicalisation over Israel/Gaza really doesn't look organic, when compared to the reaction to other conflicts.
I don't like the risk of the mouth-breather next door reading Russian propaganda, it's not myself I'm concerned about.
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.
So you want to censor what other people read? I don't think your neighbor would appreciate such patronizing attitude.
I don't appreciate my neighbors letting themselves be manipulated to do me harm. I think it's time we do something about it.
Mostly by voting in extremists that destroy the institutions that we built and offer us as a prize to their foreign masters.
Maybe they think that the current politicians are the ones who are destroying the Europe and it's you who is voting the wrong way?
The part about "foreign masters" doesn't make sense to me.
Well yes of course they do - because they've been manipulated by said propaganda!
Maybe the part about foreign masters makes more sense with this context:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/14/jd-vance-ali...
I don't want them unknowingly consuming foreign propaganda campaign content and maximally politically divisive conversation. Having spaces where identities are confirmed is really important for honest and open debate. Screaming at each other in Reddit and Facebook comments amongst society-fracturing influence campaigns isn't free speech. And if someone wants to leave the identity confirmed space and go yell in the anonymous sea of voices they can but we need other options.
By drysine 2026-01-115:34 >I don't want them unknowingly consuming foreign propaganda campaign content and maximally politically divisive conversation.
Good point.
That's what Putin's "foreign agents" law addresses.
The law is much criticized by Western media and "NGOs" for some reason.
As a matter of fact, it marginalizes any recipient of foreign money even if they do something genuinely good for Russian people, but I doubt it is why the West doesn't like this law.
By rayiner 2026-01-1014:38 Europeans have compromised “democracy” in an effort to protect “liberal.” And that will unravel the whole thing.
By torpid 2026-01-112:27 If you cannot tolerate “Russian bots” or “Chinese bots,” then you do not truly stand for free speech. It really is that simple. Free speech, by definition, exists to protect speech that someone finds offensive or objectionable. If everyone only said things that others agreed with, there would be no need for free speech protections at all. In a genuine marketplace of ideas, it is astonishing that anyone would claim the right to censor others, or to strip them of their humanity by dismissing them as mere robots or agents rather than people with sincere views.
Yet we are increasingly binding ourselves (and even “authorized” bots) in chains of verified identity, deliberately suppressing anonymity. Imposing a “zero-trust” architecture on society inevitably leads to totalitarianism.
The right to express ideas without personal attribution has always been a cornerstone of free speech and a free society. It is now being redefined and demonized as mere “bot activity.” While real bots certainly exist (as they have since the days of spam) many accounts labeled as bots are simply human beings who choose anonymity because they hold controversial opinions they do not wish to have traced back to them.
Companies like Cloudflare are among the leaders in this shift by building frameworks ostensibly to monetize AI bot traffic. The consequence, however, is the effective end of online anonymity. When anonymity is forbidden, freedom itself disappears.
I see lots of disagreements here, but I must say I also soured on free speech. I used to think that free speech was necessary and overall a positive for society. Then I saw the Capitol attack in US. The disinformation spread in England about kids stabbed that led to riots. I see disinformation every day, especially from USA, saying Europe has no freedom, that it's overrun with criminals, and people not only believe it, but vote accordingly. This has to stop. Humans weren't trained to use rationality and reasoning every second of their life. Reason costs a lot of cognitive power so the brain implements a hundred shortcuts. For example: if you see something appear frequently, you assume it to be true. This is good for avoiding poisonous plants, but it's terrible when you go in Twitter and you're spammed with the same lies day and night. It's messing with us. Enough is enough. Free speech with guardrails.
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.
By vladvasiliu 2026-01-1012:121 reply I agree that people clearly don't use critical thinking 100% of the time and are easily influenced.
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?
By tankenmate 2026-01-1012:241 reply "But you're basically arguing for not criticizing the status quo.", but that wasn't what was argued ("You should be able to insult and criticise the Prime Minister."), but more your interpretation of what was said. You're making a strawman argument.
By vladvasiliu 2026-01-1012:341 reply Well, the PM isn't exactly the status quo, I wasn't replying to that. Rather, I was responding to this specific bit, emphasis mine:
> 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.
By Imustaskforhelp 2026-01-1016:03 To be really honest, I share a similar stance to you overall but I would still admit that there is some partial truth to it
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.
By techblueberry 2026-01-1013:29 Yeah, I want to be more supportive of free speech, but I don’t think anyone is doing a great job of representing how to do it in the social media age. FIRE does a terrible job of it with mostly platitudes with no nuance.
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.
By ricardobeat 2026-01-1112:581 reply Those are not matters of freedom of speech, but the unhealthy amount of power social media platforms have come to possess. The problem is how they amplify and distribute disinformation because engagement = advertising money. Free speech does not (and should not) mean you get worldwide reach.
Any platform distributing 'content' over a certain audience size should be treated as a media company and subject to much stricter rules and some kind of ethical oversight - like newspapers used to.
By kevin061 2026-01-1114:06 I can agree with that.
Unlimited free speech could have been positive maybe 100 years ago. Strikes, protest, writing angry letters to your Mayor demanding change are all great forms of speech.
Posting some unhinged xenophobic conspiracy theory on Twitter for everyone to see and to get retweeted by the President of the US or the most powerful CEOs are toxic and corrosive forms of speech.
Freedom of speech is binary, there aren't any acceptable degrees of it: either you have it, or you don't.
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.
> Freedom of speech is binary, there aren't any acceptable degrees of it: either you have it, or you don't.
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.
By jnovek 2026-01-1012:09 It’s not even the American definition. We have many exceptions, particularly using speech to cause violence or physical harm in various ways. I’m also confused by American free speech absolutists because that’s not a thing here and essentially never has been.
Of course this is all hypothetical at the moment, as the current administration doesn’t seem to care much for the law.
By Karuhanga 2026-01-1012:56 Community notes typically kicks in after the tweet has already gone insanely viral. It’s not useless, but I wonder about its effectiveness.
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?
By pfdietz 2026-01-1013:05 So, how do you feel about libel and slander laws? Don't they torpedo your binary framing there?
By thefounder 2026-01-1012:15 >> If there is disinformation, the solution is to counter it with actual information
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.
By budududuroiu 2026-01-1010:152 reply > 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 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?
By dependsontheq 2026-01-1010:351 reply Yes we need to restrict the freedom of non citizens to influence our debates. And we need to have rules how digital platforms can influence our internal debates, we had this rules for TV and newspapers. That's not suppression thats's defense.
By budududuroiu 2026-01-1010:442 reply How do you restrict the freedom of non-citizens without restricting the freedom of citizens too?
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
By whilenot-dev 2026-01-1013:06 For me, it's a matter of authenticity at scale...
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.
By tankenmate 2026-01-1012:31 "The EU is more of a threat to itself than Russia is"; it can be easily argued that this is only the case if democracy has little value because in Russia democracy does indeed have little value (let alone life, etc).
"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 average person in Europe does neither care about chat control, nor have they heared more about tgan one or two surface-level news articles. Russian propaganda being more and more effective and these actions are not related.
By budududuroiu 2026-01-1010:51 Russian propaganda is effective because the EU leadership has dropped the ball so hard that the Kremlin looks attractive. People aren't as stupid as you think
By 762236 2026-01-1015:28 That isn't a Russian. It is me, an American. It is convenient for you to dismiss my arguments as Russian so that you can ignore their validity. The same thing happens in the US: people dismiss arguments by saying they are right wing (i.e., from Republicans)
By raxxorraxor 2026-01-1016:431 reply To be honest, I think this argument is FUD as well. There are some Russian accounts and there is disinformation, but this isn't the core of polarization in western democracies and Europe in particualr. And reigning in free speech is even poison in this situation, which is more complex than pointing your finger at bots.
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.
By arrosenberg 2026-01-1017:25 The fear is being heavily stoked by agitprop on social media.
Not just Russia and China. Musk does Nazi salutes and Grok promotes pedophilia. Trump invades countries and talks about taking over Greenland, which is part of Europe. The US are no less of a threat than Russia.
Contrary to widespread belief, Europe has the means to fight those threats. It just chooses not to, for reasons I don't understand.
By randomNumber7 2026-01-1016:21 Most europeans are completely delusional.
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.
By qcnguy 2026-01-1014:05 Interesting how now the list has expanded to include Chinese "bots" and "actors". Calling anyone who disagrees with your political beliefs a foreigner is an old and extremely paranoid, nasty rhetorical trick. Very similar to the people who call everything they dislike racism.
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.
By rotarycellphone 2026-01-1010:281 reply [flagged]
By dependsontheq 2026-01-1010:314 reply an account created 5 minutes ago
By ErroneousBosh 2026-01-1010:481 reply HN should put the IP addresses that comments from brand new accounts are posted from right beside the name.
I bet you'd be able to plot some pretty interesting maps from that.
By Bender 2026-01-1011:03 Maybe the first two octets but HN does not block proxies, VPS nodes, servers, etc... The site would have to block such things for new accounts and store the IP used to create the account for that information to be useful assuming residential shady VPN's were not used. I doubt that level of change would occur here given the topic of dark mode comes up often.
By budududuroiu 2026-01-1010:522 reply Their point still stands though
By whilenot-dev 2026-01-1012:10 It isn't even obvious to me which country GP refers to when they write "i already live in one". No reasonable individual would criticize "liberal politicians" and "electronic dictatorship" without making it absolutely clear where they are coming from. This obfuscation seems like a deliberate choice and makes any standing point balancing on crutches.
By AlexeyBelov 2026-01-1111:48 No. Troll accounts are not a good thing.
By jetsetk 2026-01-1011:02 How is that relevant wrt the argument?
By rotarycellphone 2026-01-1011:25 [dead]
By sethops1 2026-01-1012:17 Yes. There are numerous fresh accounts being created to flood this very thread.
By olivermuty 2026-01-1012:091 reply You’re either very gullible or you are the answer to the question you just asked.
By mlrtime 2026-01-1012:22 Or, OP may agree there are Russian bots, but they aren't "in the room right now" because they are not a major risk. They are not a major risk vs letting a government agency dictate to Cloudflare to take down a site globally.
By aforwardslash 2026-01-0920:319 reply Regardless of whether the law is absurd or not (I honestly have no idea, but we've seen some crazy stuff lately in the EU), its kinda precious that a CEO only complains about it when his company is fined.
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".
He did mention that they were fighting the law before they were fined and they plan to challenge the fine in court. He has also been vocal about other similar legislation before they were enacted or the company got fined (not sure about this specific one though).
So I don't think it's fair to characterize it as he "only complains about it when his company is fined".
He also said this:
> 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.
By rediguanayum 2026-01-102:551 reply He's giving Italy and Italians fair warning that he will abandon the Italian market to avoid being subject to their laws, and I think it will go that way. I guess it's up to the Italians to find a replacement.
By h33t-l4x0r 2026-01-106:552 reply Find a replacement global edge network and get the rest of the world to use it?
By its-kostya 2026-01-1014:44 Can't have a global edge network without also being a big player - something Cloudflare is disliked for. You're suggesting everyone move to a new provider, so we can dislike the new vendor instead?
By cteiosanu 2026-01-1013:27 At least 2 major competitors have good enough global edge networks.
By DangitBobby 2026-01-104:401 reply Why does his rant piss you off?
By whatthesmack 2026-01-1013:021 reply Likely because it mentions JD Vance and the current US administration in a positive light, since they have rightly shone a bright light on the active decline of free speech in Europe.
By troyvit 2026-01-1019:59 Thanks for answering for me but you got it wrong. Believe it or not other people can be as nuanced as the CEO of Cloudflare.
I've had the pleasure of working for CEOs who don't resort to public threats (or all caps) to get their point across. When I chose who leads me or who I work with stability and consistency are key. This just sounds like a man who thinks he can flex his way out of a problem and that is just such a short sited way to solve problems. Not my kind of CEO.
Why shouldn't they resort to strongarming? Italy literally wants to blacklist IPs at whim for the entire planet. Cloudflare CEO is 100% in the right to strongarm them. Who do these people even think they are, to censor the planet's DNS?
By aforwardslash 2026-01-160:14 They are not censoring the planets dns. Cloudflare is a private company that provides dns resolution and it must comply with the local laws of the multiple places it engages in business with.
Just like every other company. From italian isps to vodafone to google.
What makes cloudflare so special?
> financing a company that thinks it is above the law
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.
By jauntywundrkind 2026-01-0923:22 For real. Laws likee anti-circumvention laws are a horrible plague on humanity. There's all kinds of nonsense & so often businesses have far too much sway or outright grasp over the legal system.
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
By aforwardslash 2026-01-160:18 Yes i offered a simplification, but reality is often nuanced. But, if you are in business, you accepted the terms and profited from them; Im not disputing how stupid or far-fetched the law is - Im just pointing out the child in the room.
If it is as the rant describes, every other company operating in the italian market has also to accomodate this; where is the rant from the other CEOs? From the telecom providers? From the VPN endpoints?
I share that perspective. Being an international company is a challenging thing regards law. You have to operate in best intent, and judges respect that.
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.
By DangitBobby 2026-01-104:422 reply It feels good to see someone give a giant middle finger to corruption.
A giant middle finger to corruption by sucking up the most corrupt government the US has ever seen?
By DangitBobby 2026-01-104:441 reply I don't know if you read the tweet? Maybe give it another go.
By cteiosanu 2026-01-1013:27 I did. It reads exactly the same. Suck up to the current US government.
By Hamuko 2026-01-107:14 Did Matthew donate to the Trump ballroom yet?
By tick_tock_tick 2026-01-1010:05 > 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.
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.
Style aside, what do you think he should do? Faced with a law that not only imposes disproportionate fines (more than revenue from the country), but on the surface also requires blocking globally, there are really only a few things to do:
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
> Challenge the law in court
Do the courts in Italy work or do they do what the govt wants them to do.
By blacklanzer 2026-01-108:54 The government complains everyday about the judges and it's trying to make a referendum to make judges angry, so I wouldn't say courts do what govt says
By kubb 2026-01-1010:21 Yes, the judiciary is an independent branch in Italy, alongside the executive and the legislative.
It looks like he skipped 1 and 2 and went straight for option 3. I wonder why that is.
how ever did you reach that conclusion? For 1, his tweet literally says "That, of course, is DISGUSTING and even before yesterday’s fine we had multiple legal challenges pending against the underlying scheme." 2 is something that happens behind the doors, and it's rather uncharitable to just assume he skipped it.
By wmf 2026-01-105:15 That's fair, but he also didn't give any specifics. If Cloudflare is suing Italy there should be some documents we can read.
By aforwardslash 2026-01-1011:38 What did the other major companies do?
By mlrtime 2026-01-1012:59 When I read this I was thinking that I'd be grateful for the CEO of a company I worked for to write this.
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.
By tuwtuwtuwtuw 2026-01-0920:452 reply What is an example of a crazy law from EU?
By aforwardslash 2026-01-0921:191 reply By tuwtuwtuwtuw 2026-01-0921:253 reply Agreed. But to be fair, the proposal was rejected.
By cls59 2026-01-0923:06 The fact that it was even proposed in the first place is still concerning.
By xinayder 2026-01-106:12 It wasn't, it passed on the Council of EU.
By NoahZuniga 2026-01-0922:12 Not for long, seemingly.
Effective ban of GMOs across EU, ban on paternity tests in France without a court order are the two that come to mind for me.
By cteiosanu 2026-01-1013:25 This 1000x times!
Crying free speech and attempting to rile up the tech bros is just what companies do these days.
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.
By flumpcakes 2026-01-1010:27 American free speech as of 2026 includes openly threatening to invade European territory unless it is given away.
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.
By TheMagicHorsey 2026-01-0922:38 [flagged]
By ryan_n 2026-01-101:56 > I don't feel comfortable financing a company that thinks it is above the law
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?
