Tell HN: Cloudflare now censors Polymarket in Germany | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Cloudflare now censors Polymarket in Germany

7 pointsbaobabKoodaa9 comments

Since today, CloudFlare suddenly started censoring Polymarket for German users without any prior warning. Pretty nasty to do this to traders who have active positions and orders who are suddenly unable to exit their positions and cancel their orders. Polymarket has responded to this by adding Germany to their list of restricted markets. No official announcement is visible from either the German government, Polymarket or CloudFlare. This is what you get when you start censoring the internet. It never is just the CP and nazis. It just expands and expands and the people supporting censorship do not care how many people they hurt.

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If they actually cared about how they impact people, the minimum they could do is give 24 hours warning to exit positions. This shows they absolutely do not care.

How does it do this? If Cloudflare is censoring DNS records, users can switch to another DNS server.

Or have Polymarket themselves put Cloudflare in front of their services? If so, how do we know Cloudflare initiated this, not Polymarket themselves?

We know because reports on the Polymarket Discord began with reports about Cloudflare blocking, and later on Polymarket added the trading restriction on their end. If the initiative to block had come from Polymarket, these events would have unfolded in reverse order.

> CloudFlare ... censoring Polymarket for German users

How?

CloudFlare is the main censorship provider on the internet. I don't know what you're asking?

I don't see that assertion substantiated e.g. on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudflare

And anyway, Cloudflare can censor a site only if the site owner requests or allows, right?

No. CloudFlare was at one point proudly making luvlic statements about censoring nazis.

Cloudflare could "censor" DailyStormer only because DailyStormer themselves put Cloudflare in front of their services. Same with Polymarket.

You're moving the goalpost here. The claim I was responding to was:

> Cloudflare can censor a site only if the site owner requests or allows, right?

This is different than what you're saying:

> Cloudflare could "censor" DailyStormer only because DailyStormer themselves put Cloudflare in front of their services. Same with Polymarket.

Yes, you are correct that Cloudflare can only censor their own customers. But that is a different point than the one I was responding to.

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