The title on the website is “Google, Cloudflare & Cisco Will Poison DNS to Stop Piracy Block Circumvention”.
Curious why Cloudflare has been singled out in the submission title?
Curious why Cloudflare has been singled out in the submission title?
Also, the phrasing in both, but especially the HN title made me think Cloudflare chose to do something, but it turns out the French court is forcing all of them.
I'm surprised you're so keen on having big tech companies intentionally ignore court orders and just break the law. Like, it's obviously something none of us should want.
Shutting down public DNS in France would be an option (a garbage option that nobody would actually choose in this case and that'd solve nothing, but an option nonetheless). That's not what dmitrygr was asking for though. They want big tech companies to ignore legitimate court orders to protect some scummy football pirate sites.
It would be the ethically correct option.
If being unpopular makes a law more likely to pass, then surely the French government tars and feathers all French children every other week.
No, they don't, since the voters would prevent that by voting for a different government.
(Read: The status quo is the status quo because most people are prefer the status quo.)
From a small in-group of well connected people.
> The voters freely decide wether they wish to have representatives who pass laws which are benefitial to Elon Musk.
No, the voters at best select a bundle of stances for/against various things. Effectively this means you have no input except for maybe one or two issues you care most about. In practice you do not even get to do that as your representatives are not bound to what they promised to get you to elect them.
You are free to run as a candidate, even if you are not a well-connected person. (But of course, the voters will choose to not vote for you.)
> Effectively this means you have no input except for maybe one or two issues you care most about.
You are free to vote for someone who fully represents your opinions (yourself). But noone else will vote for that person. Democracy is about making compromises; the government is an average of people's opinions.
> In practice you do not even get to do that as your representatives are not bound to what they promised to get you to elect them.
This is true. But if a candidate lies to you, you can vote for a different candidate in the next election. Repeatedly reelecting liars is a choice voters make voluntarily.
The reason for bad laws is not that democracy doesn't work. The reason is that democracy does work, and other people keep having the wrong opinions ;)
The other answer is that you really don't want big corporations to be ignoring laws they don't like, because odds are pretty good that your list of bad laws doesn't match theirs. Countries have sovereignty. If a company doesn't want to obey those laws, they should not operate in that country. If the law really were bad, the way you'd actually fix this is by the democratic process. That's up to the voters, not foreign corporations.
It's censoring DNS. That's a bad precedent. The technical capacity to do it shouldn't exist because otherwise it will be used for every other form of censorship, and deprive democratic countries of any moral or technical authority to object when authoritarian countries want to do it.
It will also be ineffective, leading for calls to make it effective, but the only way to do that is totalitarianism. There is no good that comes from setting out on that road.
> The other answer is that you really don't want big corporations to be ignoring laws they don't like, because odds are pretty good that your list of bad laws doesn't match theirs.
Ignoring the law doesn't get them out of paying the penalty, but penalties are meant to be sane, not some Hollywood accounting nonsense where one person watching one illicit stream of a sporting event causes the event organizers six billion dollars in damages. Then if Cloudflare wants to say "yeah, we're not doing that" and just pay the $100,000 dollar fine, it's clear that they're standing on principle -- they're paying $100,000 in exchange for ostensibly nothing -- and there is nothing wrong with that. The purpose of the penalty is to deter the underlying wrongdoing, not to deter civil disobedience. Anyone should be able to say "I am going to suffer the consequences of this because my principles are worth more than the fine" without having some authoritarians ratchet up the penalty to infinity.
> Countries have sovereignty.
Democratic countries have checks and balances. One of the checks and balances is that if you pass a law people don't respect, they don't respect it. Then you have to choose between punishing not the evildoers, but the principled idealists -- or repealing the law.
France uses a sane legal system based on civil law, so precedents rarely matter. In this case the Sports Code says that piracy is bad and operators can be requested to block piracy websites if they're used and "harm" rights holders. That doesn't mean that tomorrow in a random case not related to sports piracy a judge can refer to that law and order censoring of other DNS entries.
What does online streaming have to do with unsanctioned boating activities.
> What's odious about copyright laws?
Their violation of our rights to freely share and improve on our culture.
> This also appears to be pretty much the gold standard of due process.
This doesn't mean the court's decision is any more defensible.
And it would all be done under the color of local law.
But also, in answer to your question, sort of, yes. 1.1.1.1 is any cast so that users will be routed to a server geographically near them. So then 1.1.1.1 a user gets in the US is quite literally a different one than a user in France will get.
I suspect France could find a way to make things very difficult for them all.
I suppose they could withdraw their service from the country in protest, but it's not obvious that would leave anyone better off.
It's a difficult call and I'm not prepared to harshly judge an organization for complying with a legal, enforceable injunction.
If anyone wants to suggest an accurate, neutral title that gets it all under the 80 char limit, we can change it again.
Court Orders Google, Cloudflare & Cisco to Poison DNS to Stop Piracy
Heavily biased article.
Remember that dns/ip systems are decentralized at the national precisely so that countries have sovereignity.
The editorial line would have us believe that france is committing a free speech crime or overturning internet infrastructure, while in actuality they are exherting their national rights.
Further the action of a single state often influences other states, as is especially true when it comes to the internet which is global by nature.
That said genocide is categorically different than blocking websites. Slippery slope is well regarded as a fallacy.
I did mention that states can choose to go to war though. It is within reasonable realm that the US may overturn the orders of a French court when operating in their country, but it is an act of war. It is something you would do to prevent genocide, but not to allow frenchies to watch sports without paying.
Cloudflare runs widely used public DNS server 1.1.1.1
That's my guess why these two companies were singled out.
In the past 3 years or so they have repeatedly proven that to be a lie; they weren’t able to have their cake and eat it too. But their old reputation still sticks around amongst people who don’t follow the space that closely.
Yeah, this is what I was referring to, not sure about the reputation but they are still popular, that's for sure.