Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It's impressive how much internet censorship in Europe is currently being caused by this one group of extremely greedy people. It's one of the rare cases where the sheer size and international influence of companies like Google and Cloudflare can actually do some good for the world by fighting back against such laws.
How is this greedy? It's clearly illegal behavior, both from illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those re-broadcast services aren't even free either, they're directly making money from the broadcasts they're replicating.
The problem is that we still haven't figured out a way to properly enforce laws on the internet. Even for completely egregious violations there's no way to do anything once you track down the website to a bulletproof host in Russia or Ukraine or similar countries that don't cooperate. After 20 years of getting nowhere the courts have to find new and creative ways to enforce laws. I think everyone agrees that ideally this shouldn't be DNS blocks or IP blocks but rather these services getting removed from the internet and/or having to implement regional blocks to comply with laws. But there's just no way at all to make this happen right now.
It's both. The re-broadcasters may be violating the laws and laws themselves could be unjust, nonsensical, yet existing and enforced because of a group of greedy benefactors actively keeping them that way.
Because piracy is a service problem. Pirate streaming sites attract users because they provide a better, more convenient service than the paid options.
We've recently seen this happen in real time with TV/movie streaming services: If you simply tell users "Pay us this single, simple and affordable fee every month and we will provide you with unrestricted access to the content you want, whenever you want", the users will come. But then the investors come knocking. It's not enough that you made N money last quarter, you have to make N+1 next quater. The line has to go up. So the subscription prices go up, the number of subscriptions required to access everything goes up, you start getting ads even though your subscription was originally ad-free, and suddenly the service doesn't seem so appealing anymore.
I've heard endless stories of people having to pay for multiple subscriptions just to watch all of their favorite team's games, and still missing out on some due to whatever new money-making scheme sports companies came up with this month. It's not hard to see why so many people resort to just going online and finding a pirate stream.
This means that the companies are constantly testing this edge, and check whether too many subscribers start to fall off the edge when the price rises.
Morality and ethics are just a way to hurt profits.
Entities like corporations aren't conscious and have no morality. They often discover and apply such things much like the biological evolution discovers and applies things. The closest proxy to morality that affects corporations is law; I assume here a completely legal, free interaction where the customer is not even held by an imperfect, monopoly-dominated market, like suburban internet access, or, well, sports events broadcasting.
Pirate streaming sites attract users because they are cheaper. People are using them because they can’t or won’t pay.
And then sometimes only 1 or 2 seasons of a show are available for free on amazon prime, and i need to pay PER EPISODE for the remaining content. It’s also fun when a show my wife wants to watch is not available in our region - even if we wish to pay for it.
Talk about a garbage experience!
There’s a reason _some_ people with the technical chops set up something like plex or jellyfin, and source the content (via torrents or usenet) using sonarr, radarr, etc (the “ARR” stack). For some its cost savings. Others just can’t be bothered.
We can argue about the ethics of doing so all day, but it’s truly a failure on the industries part that they make things so complicated.
I don’t understand why the rights holders can’t partner with apple, netflix, whoever, and offer EVERYTHING in their catalog. And just let me pay for it! In a single app. Kind of like how i used to be able to walk into a blockbuster and pick any DVD.
anyway we clearly disagree. i personally don’t feel guilty worrying about how Hollywood actors will get paid. Have a nice day. :)
Netflix gained popularity because they sold their service artificially cheap at a loss for many years to build market share and Kill off their competition, and that's it.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/gross...
Netflix were borrowing circa $4 billion dollars a year to license content until two years ago. There's nothing wrong with that, but you aren't making a genuine profit.
In Communist times in my country I was watching cartoons broadcasted from the neighboring country. Adults were watching adult content at night from the same source. There was no way to stop that.
You can be sure it's not limited to just them. This just appears to be the most publicized example because the government happens to be the unusual position that the entity under scrutiny has far more money and legal power than they do.
I'm always curious about jurisdiction on this stuff.
If Cloudflare had no physical machines, employees, and property within Italy's borders, under what law could Italy levy a fine?
(To some degree of effectiveness, to be sure. But I have a hard time imagining there are no clients registered in italy at all.)
Edit: corrected mistake about whose account would be within the court's grasp.
That's the logic here. It's not about whether they have offices or not, but whether they are distributing content to users in Italy.
There is always a local relay or ISP in Italy that offers access to Cloudflare, and this relay can be coerced into blocking Cloudflare.
Of course 1% of people may be able to access otherwise (for example, via Starlink or VPNs), but the objective is to block 90%+ of the traffic, so Cloudflare reconsiders following local laws.
Italy has banned access to Deepseek a couple of weeks ago. Is that different?
At some point the Police in Italy found some abusive content on my site. They did not inform me, they did not report the files. Instead they just blocked the whole site with a large pedophilia warning.
I have been trying to get in contact with the Italian police for months, but there is no working email address on any of the sites, and the people on the phone only speak Italian. It's a pretty hopeless situation.
If I remember correctly, Italy criminally charged some YT execs, and asked Interpol to get them.
FWIW I don’t agree with this law. But I also do t think it’s up to American corporations to decide what laws to comply with.
Let me guess. Parent poster doesn’t consider child pornography an ‘arbitrary restriction’. Who decides what is an ‘arbitrary restriction’?
I propose we let a country’s government decide what is a reasonable restriction, not an American corporation. In this case, the Italian government.
But instead of DNS they should actually simply delete the files. It’s so simple, yet no one does it. All these forums host the files (except torrent) on some server. In general, the providers serving the file will happily delete it if asked to, they don’t want to host illegal stuff.
Example:
https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/sexueller-missbr...
Honestly, in the US, obesity is probably the number 1 factor for all sorts of illnesses and expenses, yet we do not restrict people's food, we leave it up to them, in fact, recent trends are all about how it is OK to be obese, so why care about someone unwinding after a long day of work with weed, not harming anyone, and not being a burden on the healthcare system (unlike the obese)?
You can replace weed with heroin, too, FWIW. Kratom is an alternative (illegal in some states by now), of course, but it is less clean than heroin, but this discussion is for another day.
As for the rest, I agree nevertheless.
[1] Not to be confused by people who re-use needles, litter the city with their bullshit, aggressive, stink, and so forth. My girlfriend lives in LA and she is constantly afraid of them (as she should). Many of them probably have untreated schizophrenia or something, too.
Have a good read: https://academic.oup.com/book/2163.
Seriously, they're one of the biggest restrictors of speech.
If you get a speeding ticket in North Korea and fly off before it arrives at the car rental, you can ask what law the rental is going to use to get the money from you abroad. You can not pay and choose to never visit the country again. In Cloudflare's case, however, they probably want to continue doing business in that market so just fleeing with the money is not likely the most profitable option for them
There's tons of international cases if you want to know more. It's also a common (to the point of trite) discussion point about GDPR saying it applies globally. Obviously it doesn't unless the non-treaty country lets an EU/EEA country enforce it (I am not aware that this ever happened) if the fined party does not care to continue doing business in the EEA
1. You agree up-front in the contract with the car rental company that you will pay for all fines, parking tickets, etc. you might incur during the rental. You agree ahead of time the rental company won't waste any money defending you, arguing you didn't do it, and will instead pay the whole fine immediately and pass it on to you, and payment will be automatically taken. You always agree this because otherwise they just don't rent the car to you.
2. You incur a fine.
3. The authorities fine the owner of the vehicle, which is the rental company.
4. The rental company immediately bills you for the fine, converted to the currency you paid them in, using your payment details, and they add an extra administrative fee as well.
5. The rental company pays themselves and the fine-issuing authority with your money.
...just to find out the card is blocked :)
Imagine an American SaaS company that uses Cloudflare CDN to distribute their assets and tunnels their traffic through CF for DoS mitigation. That company has paying customers in Italy. If Cloudflare gets blocked, that company's software no longer works in that country. They have a choice between switching to a different provider (which will make Cloudflare lose money) and telling their Italian customers to go away (which they don't want to do for obvious reasons).
Considering how much infra actually relies on CF, Whether the Italian government would actually fight that fight is a different matter entirely. Sometimes centralization is a good thing.
IMO, a far more interesting question is what would happen if Italy asked CF to block some content worldwide.
Sadly, companies bow down instead of just risk it once.
> probably
> bunch
> hopefully
> pretty sure
> almost
It’s a post with all the proper quantifiers and hypotheticals, which demanding people will demand the other day due to overgeneralization.
The correct response to piracy is to make your content more conveniently available to more people, so it's easier to get it through an authorized channel than through piracy. The people doing the sales want to arbitrarily pick and choose, imposing artificial scarcity, hoarding massive collections of copyright licenses, and exploit markets with outrageously inflated prices that only ever enrich the lawyers and centralized rights-holders groups, and somehow rarely ever enrich the people who create the media. And because that money gets pooled by lawyers and corrupt do-nothings, they spend huge amounts on propaganda and outright corruption of politicians to push laws like this.
The people on the other hand should demand their government to do what they (the people) wan't, and yes, people should be more powerful than the government, even if it's something like a piracy dns ban.
I'm told Italy is a hotbed of corruption and they only undid it to save face.
Not a big difference for the customers in Italy.
I assume they have _customers_ in Italy though? If so, they [cloudflare] are doing business there.
If they have no customers in Italy, then yeah… no clue.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/rome-data-center/
They have two data centers in Italy.
In term of jurisdiction, global companies tend to have physical machines, employees, and property that is spread out globally. If its not branch offices, it is equipment and remote workers. Cloudflare specifically has a branch office in Portugal and England.
It's not single people that go watch some streaming, it's a criminal organization that resells copyrighted content like footbool, F1, ... and make the customers pay (less than Sky of course). This is stealing.
And seeing what's going on in the US now, I'd maybe have the same analysis for the US.
We’re only talking about banning the foreign one.
Also, by that logic, all publishing is potentially a “national security concern”.
We should bring back RT while we're at it then eh?
If you only believe in human rights for passport holders, you don’t believe in human rights.
Furthermore, if you think your enemies having the right to publish whatever they like is a national security threat, you don’t believe in the nation or its founding principles as outlined in the US constitution.
State censorship is much more of a national security threat than foreign propaganda.
Didn't Europe ban Russia Today and other Russian state sponsored media?
Officially it was banned as a part of the economic sanctions but being a part of their war machine would have been enough of a reason by itself.
I don't know why politicians have this weird attitude towards Gaza, but they do.
Also, the propaganda on Russia Today supports strong governments, so your job as a politician will be safe even if they swing the next election. The propaganda on TikTok does not.
Well if RT was banned for other instances of disinformation, then Tiktok should absolutely be banned for this one.
The propaganda on RT is of a completely different nature than the propaganda on TikTok.
https://medium.com/enrique-dans/why-blocking-telegram-in-spa...
It was reversed quickly on complaints, though.
It was exactly 1 year ago, I know because I ordered some domains for the proxies and I just got the final reminder.
"This decision follows a similar case against Internet backbone firm Cloudflare. In January, the Court of Milan found that Cloudflare's CDN, DNS server, and WARP VPN were facilitating piracy. The court threatened Cloudflare with fines of up to 10,000 euros per day if it did not begin blocking the sites."
What about the people who own the copper that’s transporting the piracy? That actually seems like it’s more of a direct link than DNS.
[1]: https://torrentfreak.com/sony-wins-pirate-site-blocking-orde...
[2]: https://torrentfreak.com/dns-resolver-quad9-wins-pirate-site...
In other words, I think it is fair to say that Italy pulls shit like this because enough Italian voters want it to happen or otherwise let it happen.
You also have to add the fact that this issue goes relatively "unnoticed" compared to other issues that are perceived as much more important
Are you american? Should you be held responsible for Trumps' and Musks' actions?
I did not vote for Trump and I think he belongs in prison. I am not responsible as an individual but as an American I do accept that elections have consequences that we are all collectively responsible for. Sovereignty rests with We The People.
The Democratic Party lost a crazy contest to a crazy man and honestly I'm even more furious with the Democrats for losing an election that they had absolutely no business losing than I am with Trump right now.
Regardless, my point was more that the Europeans seem to delight in their heavy-handed regulations and obnoxious court orders rather than address the real issue of why people feel the need to go out of their way to stream sports events via the black market or rolling up their sleeves and providing compelling alternatives to all of these big bad American tech companies they love to hate but can't stop using.
Both Spainish and Italian governments created laws for which these companies are going after Cloudflare. Europeans elected them and work in those governments and courts.
Expecting large companies in any country not to have lawyers figure out how to use and abuse this stuff is pretty naive. Heavy regulatory environments are very popular in Europe and just like America they almost always benefit/protect entrenched powers while being sold (and defended online) as necessary to protect the small players and upstarts.
The internet has been warning about the risks of excessive anti piracy laws being anti-open internet for as long as I remember.
If the US wants some content gone from the internet, they (usually) have enough might to make that happen.
Most major tech companies are registered in the US, and can be ordered by a US court to stop providing services to pirates. This notably includes most major DNS registrars, reputable ad networks and major payment processors.
There's no point in blocking a website if you can just boot it off Visa, or force it to show penis enlargement / shady gambling ads or malware popups to survive.
Even if a website miraculously has no US links to exploit, there are extradition treaties, good relations with foreign law enforcement, control over the financial system, or even international sanctions if the situation gets dire enough.
European countries are far less powerful here, especially when they act alone (as they usually do in these matters) instead of doing it under the auspices of the EU. Site blocking is often the only remedy they have.
The US has an opposite problem with scam calls. Because there are so many English speakers in India, and Indian law enforcement largely doesn't care about scammers as long as they scam foreigners, there's little the US can do about the issue. European countries whose first language is not English have it much easier, as there's often no third-world country that speaks the same language and where the scammers could be recruited from.
This is the country that banned Tiktok, inacted the DMCA. Apparently the US has blocked 1.2m websites since 2010. They sieze domains, sieze servers. They stop payment companies working for the sites.
There are plenty of states in the US that enacted age verification laws for porn sites. Every single one of the porn sites that are not hosted in the US just ignored the laws. I live in one of those states
If this was a federal law (and one that the government actually cared about enforcing), it would be a different matter entirely. Case in point, all the crypto services that make themselves unavailable to AMericans, even if they have no direct links to the traditional financial system, much less American banks.
Site blocking is the lazy solution favored by bureaucrats who don't understand technology and as an easy way out for their tech companies from having to adapt to what the people are demanding (and getting from the black market instead). If the streaming services refuse to offer what the people want, then the people will bypass them.
because europe is pro-socialism/communism and anti-liberalism.
Operation Choke Point. MasterCard's (secret) list of banned terms. FOSTA/SESTA
The US has literally never had a free and open internet and has exported much of their toxicity.
It's taking time, but the thugs in charge in various countries are slowly coming to realize that the easiest place to apply censorship is DNS because of its antiquated design and pervasiveness.
One: you should be able to freely choose or name-to-IP-translation provider.
Two: modern DNS should run on top of a trustless blockchain infrastructure.
Namecoin was a very nice initial attempt, it's really sad it never took off.
It should be more normal for people to have a DNS running locally perhaps.
If so then that entails centralized registries and registrars.
Perhaps what you have in mind is that the registries should be published, including incremental updates, "on a blockchain" so that we can all run our own authoritative DNS root, TLD, and ccTLD servers. You don't need a blockchain for this unless you want people to be able to register domainnames without registrars to mediate the registrations.
Disintermediation of domainname registration might be a worthy goal, and it would help people run their own servers if it meant that registries were public (i.e., iterable, including ownership metadata). But you know that's going to be hard for governments to accept that insist on knowing who the domainname owners/operators are. But you don't need this in order to be able to run your own DNS authoritatives to avoid censorship: if they are public (available for download) just download the various TLD zones and serve them to your devices!
Or, if you don't care for us all to have the same view of the Internet, then.. well, I don't think that would be a good thing. You might send me a link that I can't resolve unless you tell me what DNS you're using so I can switch to it, but switching to it might break other things -- in the worst case you we might not even be able to communicate which DNSes to use in order be able to communicate! That would be terrible. So on the whole IMO we just have to have a centralized DNS and we can only hope to defeat the DNS censors by sidestepping the operators' servers that the censors will rely on -- you might as well just use a VPN.
Oh, and of course you know that nation states won't allow operating systems to have DNS censorship bypass functionality pre-installed, so most users won't know how to do it and won't do it.
Innovators cease to be represented at the government level and the general public equates regulation with safety. The result is an increasing amount of absurd policymaking related to technology.
Italy isn't Europe. Europe isn't Italy, either.
I asked if parent doesn’t think that there might be urls that should be blocked, for example sites serving child porn.
So the real answer to governments requiring dns resolvers to censor results is to ... not use those resolvers. which is actually relatively easy to do. But most internet users don't even know what a dns resolver is, much less how to configure their browser to use a public resolver that isn't big enough to attract the attention of your government.
You'd need a resolver that was provided by a foreign organization, preferably a non-profit, with no business interests in your country whatsoever, so that your government had nothing to threaten them with if they didn't comply with the order.
Such a resolver would also need to be the default shipped with at least one major browser, such that blocking it would essentially mean "turning off the internet" for some users.
Then the pressure would move to forcing browsers to use a different DNS resolver, and the game would continue.