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Another italian here; while this whole situation is bad and piracy shield is definitely not the solution, having the cloudflare CEO that threatens to remove free-tier service makes me wonder. They offer a free pill, just to be the "powerful" guys that threaten people when they are paying some million euros.

Well done my friend. :-) I'm already moving websites off cloudflare. bye!

P.S: I believe piracy shield is a s*t idea naturally.

> He phrases it to be as if the free tier is a favor Cloudflare does to the world, as if it's not obviously a loss-leader designed to get more people into the Cloudflare ecosystem.

It can be both. I run many open source websites behind cloudflare.

It's the same as github. All the free hosting and free CIs and free issues/discussion forums, and free code review for open source repos (90% of all open source projects?) happens to be a a loss leader as well.

Both are still a huge free contribution to the world. They don't have to do it. They could just have zero free anything.

I prefer to not have it at all. One thing is offering free service because you truly know the values. The other is making threats to people.

What market share would they have without offering the free tier? Much lower than what they have now, and that would make for a more decentralised and resilient internet

Do you remember how bad things were before CloudFlare? You’d get attacked constantly if you ran a large website.

I remember Tor being significantly more usable, and not having random 3 second delays on websites.

> and that would make for a more decentralised and resilient internet

The only people that say that haven't run a site on the open internet in the last decade plus. It's such an ignorant takes it's hard to take anything you say seriously.

I’m not advocating for having no protections at all. Without Cloudflare giving away protection for free it’s entirely possible that we would have multiple smaller provider offering protection at a fair price so maybe only a smaller fraction of the internet goes offline next time Cloudflare pushes a bad configuration

fair price and europe sounds interesting... regardless it still means your competition will have it easier

The first one is always free...

Im sorry but your epistemics are very wrong. Providing a free service with no strings attached to nearly every website in the world adds a ton of value, possibly more than Cloudflare’s market cap. And the fact that a free product can lead to profits, when other companies make the choice to pay more, does not remove that worldly contribution.

Cloudflare is clearly in the right. Global censorship from an unaccountable cabal is a moral wrong. There's no sense in which Italy somehow 'wins' here, because even if they win, they lose.

Clearly? Or clearly according to the statement in a Xweet from their CFO?

I am very pro-piracy, but calling to Trumpist elite reads like he thinks that European instututions have no right to censor Internet, because they are European, while controlling the Internet is an exlusive American right.

I really think Europe should adopt a Chinese approach to copyright, but I don't expect US to like it at all - they started it all after all with DMCA etc.

Presumably AGCOM are accountable to the Italian government and therefore ultimately the Italian people. Or do you just mean 'unaccountable' in the sense that Americans should be able to do whatever they please, wherever they please, and they don't appreciate being hindered by trivial things like other country's laws.

AGCOM and cloudflare ceo can all be wrong and horrible at the same time. You don't have to pick a side

Agreed!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46557533

> In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand.

This isn't international law though. It's an authoritarian move by the Italian government. "Technically" and "legally", you're correct that Cloudflare is wrong for not building infrastructure to help Italy censor the web from Italians, but sometimes you should break the law if you disagree with it strongly enough.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but I find it interesting that no where in your comment did you try to justify the behaviour other than to say "it's the law". But that is the problem. Why is it the law? Do you think the law is justified?

> My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.

Completely agree with you there. Seems like a pretty stupid move to be honest. If I were CEO of Cloudflare I'd probably just shut my mouth and censor the internet.

The law is shitty. But we have football team owners mixing with politics, and this is the end result.

Berlusconi owned football teams, Lotito owns Lazio and is actually in the party Forza Italia, one of the parties in the ruling coalition

> My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.

While that is true, the datacenters hosting those servers are going to lose a massive amount of monthly income by not having those servers colocated anymore.

And just out of curiosity, how many small/medium websites would have the in house know-how to switch to a different CDN? Cloudflare fronts your site, giving you an 'automatic' CDN, where most others require changes to your site to work with.

What happens when BunnyCDN finds itself in the same situation?

I suspect they'll follow the law and do what the court says

rather than pleading to their feudal masters on twitter and threatening to throw their toys out of the pram

> I suspect they'll follow the law and do what the court says

Which, to me, seems like a clearly worse outcome? I hate the feudal masters more than most on HN, if that somehow matters for the credibility of my own opinion.

would they follow the chat control laws too to spy on all citizens?

Well considering the fine is larger than their profits in Italy, why on earth would they keep doing business there?

Yeah lemme just keep burning money to provide a service in a single country.

Is there some idea that CF is a public utility?

Or an idea that CF should just comply with a 30 minutes zero questions asked API infamous for egregious false positives?

That CEO should stop posting but that just sounds like a business decision

The free offerings are not a loss-leader in the conventional sense of anticipating future upsell. They are a traffic generator used to drive up Cloudflare’s leverage when negotiating peering with carriers & service providers, in order to drive down the marginal cost of bandwidth for Cloudflare’s actual product, the enterprise DDoS protection, with the criticality of traffic interchange expenses being evident in the vehemence with which Cloudflare discuss peering matters, such as via the astroturf’d “bandwidth alliance” grouping they sponsor.

In which vein, anyone familiar with The Peering Playbook will recognise the kind of annoying hardball Prince thinks he is playing, but I doubt it works on nation states.

>In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand

International law??

Italian law you mean.

Why should 1.1.1.1 block a site because some Italian wanted it blocked? Sod off.

Also I am Swedish, so EU here too. Sick of this whiny victim attitude.

> International law??

Note the "general line". You know, bombing boats in international waters, abducting awful dictators and "running" the country sidelining the opposition, threatening to take over an autonomous territory of Denmark, meddling with German and British politics and generally behaving very much like fascists and a wannabe dictator.

First off, the immediate appeal to Vance and Musk is embarrassing.

It's a very unhinged, very Trumpy response. The repeated use of "cabal" and hyperbole is, as you say, embarrassing.

It's useful to know this is the official voice, tone, and attitude of CloudFlare. Now I know not to recommend it to my company. The owners would not be happy to do business with an organization that has its politics and alignment so close to the surface.

"he's technically in the wrong for not abiding to the law"

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

My conspiracy theory is that the EU is actively trying to create their own cloud through regulation after seeing the economic success from china's internet companies after the great firewall.

> EU is actively trying to create their own cloud

Unfortunately, the EU is not nearly coordinated for such a thing. And even if they were, regulation is not what will make it happen. EU is in a crisis of financial (VISA, AmEx) and software services (AWS, MS, Google) being almost entirely provided by USA. They are not going to dig themselves out of the hole by regulation.

For contrast, USA is (largely) dependent on China, Korea, and Taiwan for chips. But they decided to attack the problem by investing several hundred billion dollars to develop their domestic microchip manufacturing infrastructure [1]. This appears to be paying dividends already as TSMC is already producing chips in Arizona, and estimated 30% of all production of 2nm and better to be produced in USA by 2030.

It seems to me that this is the way nations take control of their problems. Unfortunately EU seems incapable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act

> estimated 30% of all production of 2nm and better to be produced in USA by 2030

There will come a time when the EU is also buying their chips from USA and then they'll wonder how that happened.

There will be a time when the whole world buys its Fabs from the EU. Good luck getting more after US steals Greenland...

> It seems to me that this is the way nations take control of their problems. Unfortunately EU seems incapable.

Incapable of being a nation I guess

It's not.

I think GP meant that in the sense that the EU is not a nation, it's a union of nations.

That's definitely happening. The US does this through massive government spending on American solutions. The EU is only starting to go that route as well.

This is called "digital sovereignty", and it has been a major topic for OpenInfra foundation and other open source cloud foundations. Open source, and open cloud software, is the way to ensure your data can stay inside your own borders and be governed by your local laws. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvz2PcHq0yY is one example of folks talking about this, but realistically you can find talks from OpenStack/OpenInfra going back 4/5 years on this topic.

I love this. digital sovereignty sounds so cool too

We have plenty of cloud providers, most are on national levels, not international levels.

Really?

A group of people who were elected by nobody, should, without any accountability or due process, be able to ban any website they don't like from the internet? And not just for Italians but globally?

Even if you think this is a great thing for Italians (I have no idea why anyone would think that), you expect the whole world to surrender to this absurd demand? Categorical imperative???

Piracy Shield only works within Italy. No provider has ever been expected to take down sites globally in response to a Piracy Shield trigger, or has ever done so.

Also read the start of the comment. See this?

> as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist

> i’m italian

unfortunately this preamble doesn’t add the weight you assume it should. what has being italian got to do with having an opinion on this? this and all the other “italian here” takes below. fwiw unless eastdakota is being intentionally malicious, he, with the cloudflare legal team, understands the situation and its implications for cloudflare better than any random italian.

Cloudflare is talking about Italian law and Italian policy and making comments about his actions they will take in Italy with Italian users specifically.

“Italian here” as in “I am not a random person with no skin in the game / I live in the country and presumably am more well informed on the policy he is talking about.

If there was a post about a law in nyc, I think it would be helpful to hear takes from New Yorkers.

> I believe he knows he's technically in the wrong for not abiding to the law,

Free speech loses when people answer to critics of a speech limiting law that they should just follow it.

I also didn't enjoy the bit where, after saying the EU was against what Italy is doing, then blames the whole continent of Europe for this policy...and then inflicting it on the UK, which despite brexit, is still in Europe