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Comment by exasperaited | Hacker News Reader

> If US Trade Office can be leveraged to destroy internet censorship efforts in other countries, then so be it.

So by implication you're actually completely fine with other countries pursuing their own objectives for businesses that choose to trade in their country.

Because you cannot, possibly, in 2025, be making an argument that the USA's interpretation of the way of things is unimpeachable. That would be absurd and laughable.

I look forward to you explaining to Germans and Israelis why Nazi symbols and Nazi websites should be legal because banning them hurts a US tech company's interests.

I'm pretty sure you will receive a variety of opinions, some of them in large fonts with an invitation to print them and roll them up for storage.

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If a country wants its preferred speech control, it can build its own Internet.

You are missing the point. Blocking a CDN providers IP range, means blocking all the websites using the CDN - not just the nazi-poster.com.

Well then perhaps the CDN shouldn’t be protecting those sites?

Different countries have different laws regarding what falls under freedom of speech. The CDN providers say they take a net-neutrality stance. If a court order from a specific country tells them to block certain sites, I'm pretty sure they will comply, but only for clients coming from within that country.

I’m pretty sure running pirate streams of soccer games doesn’t fall under freedom of speech

This is quite close to the whole Nazi bar analogy isn't it?

You run a bar. You let anyone in, and some of your customers are a bit edgy.

But one day, Nazis start using your bar for their regular gathering and you don't kick them out.

Congratulations: now you have a Nazi bar.

An obvious problem with this analogy is that the percentage of Cloudflare's traffic which could be Nazis even if they were hosting all the Nazis in the world would still start with a 0 followed by a decimal point.

The analogy is not about Cloudflare but about the hosting provider Cloudflare is blocking.

There is no threat of any particular service being overrun with any particular ideology. That isn't how this works. If the same host is hosting the websites of both Israeli and Muslim groups, neither of them would even be aware of the other being on the same servers unless somebody told them.

Moreover, Cloudflare is the CDN being blocked by foreign ISPs because their laws require ISPs to do blocking on the basis of IP address even though Cloudflare's IP addresses are shared by huge numbers of other customers. It's effectively an attempt to punish international companies for having customers who do something which is illegal in one country even if it's legal in their own country, e.g. some content is in the public domain in one country but not another. It's an attempt to apply one country's laws to another country.

Which is a trade barrier because it prevents a company from serving the customers in both jurisdictions, creating a preference for domestic companies that don't operate in the jurisdictions with less restrictive laws.

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