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Comment by djoldman | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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?

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I'm not sure how there's any ambiguity to this? We're talking about the EU here. The same laws that enable you to do business across borders without having a legal presence in every country also outline how to deal with issues like these.

They need to say "fuck off, then, enjoy EuropeNet" and ignore their demands. There should be zero ambiguity and zero compliance. The internet doesn't work if arbitrary restrictions on speech get imposed. You cannot give a single goddamn inch or they will claw miles away, insidiously inserting their ever growing list of forbidden things.

Child porn? Drug markets?

Neither of those things are addressed by DNS poisoning

One tool in the toolbox.

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.

The UK literally requires DNS providers to do poisoning via Cleanfeed by law for child pornography.

Classic "what about the children" fallacy

Not at all. The comment I was responding to said the internet doesn’t work with ’arbitrary restrictions’.

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.

No, we should not let the Government to meddle in people's business at all. Have we not seen enough about the awful consequences of Government intervention? We need less nanny states, not more.

Well again, when does “meddling“ starts and when does “provide good conditions for a thriving civilisation” starts. I think I want the government to chase criminals. Although I agree that movies piracy is really low on my list of priorities when it comes to criminals.

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...

Piracy is low on my list too, but so are people who do drugs as long as they do it at home[1], responsibly, so called productive junkies. Child porn is indeed high on the list, though.

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.

In the parts of the EU I've lived there is plenty of dietary paternalism, from banning sugar in schools to mandating that products carry "nutri-scores." It's not very controversial either.

What about drug markets? There will always be demand for it, for many reasons. You simply cannot stop demand.

Have a good read: https://academic.oup.com/book/2163.

I agree with you. My point is that one persons “arbitrary restrictions” is different from somebody else’s.

I completely agree.

The internet most definitely does work with some restrictions on speech, pretty much everywhere worldwide has rules that limit freedom of speech to some extent. In some countries it's defamation, in others it's hate speech, etc, and it's no different in the US. Freedom of speech means you're protected from government censorship, not that you can freely say anything without consequence. For example, you can't publicly say that you will give X amount of money to anyone who will kill person Y, that's not what freedom of speech is about.

As evidenced by the fact that the Internet still works with Cloudflare on it.

Seriously, they're one of the biggest restrictors of speech.

The point of Cloudflare is that it's widely available and that your customers can connect to it. Italy could block Cloudflare access to Cloudflare for its citizens, which would make non-italian CF customers who have users in Italy extremely unhappy.

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.

CF blocking a whole country like this would be interesting... basically half the internet would stop working, probably a bunch of italian government stuff too, and people would hopefully blame the government, because i'm pretty sure there are almost zero italian voters who wanted this from their representatives.

Sadly, companies bow down instead of just risk it once.

> basically

> probably

> bunch

> hopefully

> pretty sure

> almost

What are you trying to say?

I'm not going to say that this is necessarily true, but why even post anything if you're going to waffle that much?

CF down means an unclear but sizeable amount of the internet down, so “basically half”. There’s no info on CF usage by government, but “probably a bunch” is a realistic guess. Voters opinions vary, but there are chances that they see that blocking is unreasonable, so “hopefully almost no one”.

It’s a post with all the proper quantifiers and hypotheticals, which demanding people will demand the other day due to overgeneralization.

They're all from the post I was replying to, once I realised how meaningless the post was because of all of these, I gave up taking it seriously

Are you suggesting that it is a good thing for corporations to be more powerful than governments?

We can always use the awesome moral compass "If I like it, yeah!"

When the government is acting badly, yeah

Yes, it is a good thing governments do not have absolute authority over whatever they decide and have to follow laws protecting the rights of people who own corporations, like not having to censor one set of people because another set of people paid a lot of money so they can continue exploiting the public with outrageous licensing laws.

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.

Why would they be more powerful than their governments? It's the government forcing them to ban (or else, the fines), the government is in a position of power here.

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.

In fact, Italy DID block Cloudflare within the country at one point, and a bunch of people DID blame the government, and the government undid it.

I'm told Italy is a hotbed of corruption and they only undid it to save face.

The EU companies make payments to Cloudflare, and these could be confiscated. Also any staff in Italy is in danger.

The question clearly stated the assumption that there is no staff in Italy. Also the payments cannot be confiscated unless they are made to Italian banks, which makes no sense if they don't have a branch there, so if the payments are made to US, there is no way to confiscate by the Italian authorities.

Presumably italian courts could seize payments made by italian clients of cloudflare, yes? Even if the account is located well outside of italy, the owners can be compelled by legal means.

(To some degree of effectiveness, to be sure. But I have a hard time imagining there are no clients registered in italy at all.)

The payment is done, money is at Cloudflare in a US bank, Cloudflare takes it and move it somewhere else. How do they seize it? The money is gone and it's not coming back.

Assuming the client is an italian company, as would make sense in this thread, they would issue a court order compelling the corporation to comply with domestic law or get fined (or worse, idk, this is all speculative). Presumably the ask would be handing over control of the client's bank account for the needs of the court fulfilling its duties moving forward from the court order.

Edit: corrected mistake about whose account would be within the court's grasp.

It's more simple, imagine Cloudflare is used to show pedophile content, and refuses to remove it. Then the solution is to cut access to Cloudflare.

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.

Connections to foreign computers are not subjected to regulation currently.

> Connections to foreign computers are not subjected to regulation currently.

Italy has banned access to Deepseek a couple of weeks ago. Is that different?

The "refuses ro remove it" part is not even necessary. I run a large cloud storage site, and like all cloud storage it sees some abuse. I have set up a few processes to detect and remove child abuse content.

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.

That is a big 'if' though. Don't CDNs work by having equipment in every country so you don't have to?

They can peer with large local providers / exchanges and rent some of their local storage capacity without owning that equipment, and without having corporate presence in Italy. (You don't have to be German to rent a Hetzner server, do you?)

That's enough of a corporate presence. Whatever they have in Italy can be shut down. You don't get to not follow the law just because you're buying from a vendor.

Enough to shut down by ordering that the local providers stop providing service to Cloudflare; likely not enough to sue Cloudflare proper.

Not a big difference for the customers in Italy.

> If Cloudflare had no physical machines, employees, and property within Italy's borders, under what law could Italy levy a fine?

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.

Many many years ago there was a case, when youtube showed school bullying video from Italy, in recommended content, for several weeks.

If I remember correctly, Italy criminally charged some YT execs, and asked Interpol to get them.

Imagine an American defrauded a bunch of Italians remotely from America and then when Italy tried to extradite him he claimed that he had never been to Italy so their laws couldn't possibly apply to him. That would obviously be absurd. And similarly since Cloudflare engages in business transactions (albeit remotely) in Italy they must follow Italian law regulating such transactions.

Unfortunately, even if we ignore the fact that Cloudflare probably has many Italian customers, there are other ways they can interfere with Cloudflare's services, such as by blocking their IP addresses in the country. It wouldn't be the first time this has been done by European ISPs, sadly.

Is that a problem for Cloudflare or with Italy? In the end, can Italy break Internet or can Internet cut off Italy? It is a theoretical question, I wonder how much control countries can have over a non-country level concept as Internet. The jurisdiction question is very much the point, does Cloudflare or Google provide a paid DNS service to Italian clients and the contract is regulated by Italian laws or it is a universal and free DNS service that Italy cannot regulate?

Italy already blocked Cloudflare once. The Mafia (seriously, it's thought to run a lot of these legal sports things) is a more powerful force in Italy than working internet.

> If Cloudflare had no physical machines, employees, and property within Italy's borders, under what law could Italy levy a fine?

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.

What do you mean what law? See the court case, they've issued it and so they can either pay it or see what Italy wants to do about it

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

I'm not sure North Korea is a place you'd make a car rental, but this is now 99% of car rentals work:

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.

Indeed this is how it generally works with rentals. GP’s situation can just be reframed as “you get a ticket handed to you for [any small infraction] and leave the country without paying”.

> The rental company immediately bills you for the fine

...just to find out the card is blocked :)

You can get away with that once, but the downside is you can't rent a car again (from that company, and possibly other companies if they share information about fraudsters with each other)

Which was exactly the point being talked about

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