Comment by _hyn3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _hyn3 | Hacker News Reader

Why does Cloudflare need to police the traffic of whatever passes through it? That's the height of absurdity. As a pass through, Cloudflare is just a few steps up from a bare wire and can't be held legally responsible for all the information that passes through it.

Besides, there are multiple U.S. laws that already govern this, especially:

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)).

This law is a bedrock, foundational law that helps the Internet grow by protecting ISPs and providers from liability.

Lastly, the U.S. is a sovereign country. A judgment from another country would need to be fully adjudicated here under U.S. law or any applicable treaties like the Berne Convention, not Moldovan law. Otherwise, chaos would reign. You would end up defending yourself from random judgments from foreign courts with radically different laws or even completely different ways of looking at IP protection that you might not even be aware of or be able to defend yourself from. This would be grotesquely unfair and manifestly unjust.

CDA 230 does not cover liability from copyright infringement which is what the underlying Moldovan court judgment is about. The relevant law is DMCA 512 (17 USC 512) which specifically requires those who want to disclaim liability to comply with properly-formatted takedown requests. DMCA 512 is annoying at best, censorious at worst. I have a personal disdain for it and other copyright laws. But it's clear Cloudflare has a legal obligation to remove infringing content.

Furthermore, the questions you raise about jurisdiction are already covered by a bevy of international trade treaties. Notably, Moldova is a party to the Berne Convention as well as the US, so the judgments are entirely compatible. Yes, being on the Internet subjects you to hundreds of countries' laws at once[0], and the only reason why we have an Internet is because we have lots of treaties governing what judgments made where can be ported to which countries' jurisdictions.

Suffice it to say, any argument based solely on "you have no jurisdiction because I've never heard of you before and can't point to your country on a map" is not getting far in a court of law.

[0] If you think this is crazy, let me introduce you to the "linguistic jurisdiction argument", in which courts argue jurisdiction from the fact that you spoke that country's official language.

None of what you just said about US law is relevant here. Yes, Cloudflare has to abide by international law where it operates. This is established and every company across the globe is subject to it.

Cloudflare operates in and has a physical data center presence in Moldova, serves content owned by Moldovan citizens, and serves content to Moldovan citizens. Thus, they are subject to Moldova law. If they don’t want to be subject to it, they can remove their operations from the country and remove any interactions with Moldovans.

The site in question is presumably not hosted in Moldova, so the thing you're suggesting is unworkable. Suppose country A has common carriage laws that prohibit a provider from denying service without a court order and the thing being hosted in country A is legal in country A but not country B. If the provider removes it they're in violation of the laws of country A, where it's being hosted. If they can now be found in violation of the laws of country B, where it isn't being hosted but is illegal, that's a catch 22.

Moreover, it's pointless to expect that to do any good because the customer could obviously just use a provider that operates in country A but not in country B. Therefore, a presence in country B should be irrelevant when that isn't where the customer is because you're otherwise just setting up a catch 22 for no benefit.

Then they have to withdraw from one of those countries. There's no law that says you can ignore laws that conflict with laws from other countries.

If you want to use a GPL library and a proprietary library then you aren't allowed to - you can't choose to ignore the one you like the least.

> Then they have to withdraw from one of those countries.

This is equivalent to saying that no company can have operations is more than one country. Countries have so many laws that there will be a conflict between them somewhere.

The obvious and longstanding solution is for the company to set up a foreign subsidiary and then the subsidiary in that country complies with that country's laws. But that's not the same thing as expecting the subsidiaries in other countries to comply with the laws of a country they're not in.

But they ARE in that country.

What's "they"? The Cloudflare subsidiary in Moldova is presumably a different entity than the one in the US. The issue is they're trying to enforce the law of Moldova against the US corporation for things it does in the US.

Sounds like a plan.

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