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Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't matter waht the terms and conditions are. This is German courts deciding what Cloudflare's legal liabilities are within Germany if they want to operate within Germany.

Cloudflare either complies or is blocked within Germany. That happens Cloudflare loses lots of customers.

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> That happens Cloudflare loses lots of customers.

A couple of PoPs perhaps, but a lot of customers?

Easily thousands within a day of being blocked. Lots of companies use Cloudlfare and do business in Germany and can't afford to be blocked as it would literally cost them money to be blocked.

I use lots of services that are not based or have a presence in my current EU country though. Do Cloudflare even _have_ a German office and entity?

Doesn't matter for German courts to tell ISPs to block their IPs. German courts get to decide what is and is not allowed within their country and if they decide your service is illegal and block it, there isn't much you can do but try and go to the EU courts to have it overturned but that is very unlikely. But while you go through the process with the EU courts you're still blocked.

I do believe that Germany blocking CF endpoints would knock Germany even further back into the stone age, and would hurt Germany a lot more than it would hurt CF.

A large amount of companies would drop CF like a brick. Nearly every company operating in Germany that uses CF would drop it, very few would be willing to say goodbye to money to keep CF. Any CTO affected who wouldn't drop them should be fired. A vendor should not be removing your ability to operate in markets.

It would seriously hit CF's stock price as it would be a massive sign that there is a massive risk of other countries blocking it. And some competitor would pick up all the customers fleeing. CF is not the only game in town, switching to a competitor or just dropping it completely is often rather easy.

Any CEO running CF or similar company willing to call the bluff of a country on something like this should be booted by the board. It would have a massive effect on CF long term while it would have a reasonably short term effect to Germany and German consumers. For example, every sale call would have people asking if their primary markets are at the risk of being blocked. That's a major objection to add.

Make no mistake, being blocked in the 4th largest economy in the world is extremely bad for any company.

They currently have job listings for 12 roles in Munich, Germany which suggests that have an office there.

They also have job listings for 6 remote roles in Germany, so even if they had no offices there that suggests they have employees there which would probably open them up to some German law.

They should sue the government for blocking them.

Sue the government for blocking a company that doesn't obey its laws? Sure you could take them to the EU court, but during that time you're still going to be blocked. And you would almost certainly lose there too since governments are allowed to set their own laws as long as they comply with EU laws.

What counts as "operating within Germany"? Does having a publically routable internet address count as operating within Germany?

In the terms of Cloudflare and other internet companies providing digital services pretty much.

They have lots of German customers too.

Germany has a Chinese-style firewall where they can just block parts of the Internet?

Countries just tell ISPs they need to block ips. It's easy to bypass, see the pirate bay blocks.

Even America has a Chinese-style firewall - it's called Cloudflare.

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