Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com