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Comment by troyvit | Hacker News Reader

I'm a team lead in an American organization that relies heavily on Cloudflare's Project Galileo[1], and I read that post with growing dread. My first thought was that this guy doesn't sound very much like a CEO. Let me rephrase that: He sounds like the kind of unhinged CEO of orgs I try to stay away from (X, for instance).

Then I read what you're talking about:

> [...] we are considering the following actions: [...] 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; [...]

That's punishing all of Italy's users including those whose job it is to call truth to power (Project Galileo is free for journalists). If my state had a similar spat with Cloudflare would we be in danger of losing the infrastructure we've grown to depend on?

I was complacent and we need to re-think our relationship with them. It's true what they say: there's no such thing as a free lunch.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/galileo/

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He has a point about why they would they offer a country services, when the country fines them more than their entire revenue in the said jurisdiction.

I agree, and I'm really split about a lot of this, because screw this ~blackmail~ extortion AGCOM was trying to pull. The only thing I'd say is that a country is more than a department, and these actions will hurt others who had no influence on AGCOM's decisions far more than it'll hurt AGCOM directly. Maybe it will create pressure against AGCOM and force them to back down.

But as a middle manager of a small nonprofit who makes decisions for my org's web infrastructure I have to make sure our organization's infra doesn't become part of a bargaining chip in a future conflict between a giant company and our government.

Cloudflare has very limited leverage here. Punishing the entire country for the actions of their elected government in hope of protest is about as good as they can do other than hoping Trump does something crazy. Every italian citizen has some say over their governments actions, even if they dont support them.

The act of threatening unrelated customers just because they are in the same country is extremely stupid.

Businesses might not care whether he tweets at JD Vance or Taylor Swift, but the risk of having your website shut down because the CEO of your firewall vendor has a psychological breakdown on Twitter is unacceptable.

It is Friday evening in Europe and the fact that Cloudflare leadership and Cloudflare legal team couldn't put out a statement to mitigate this situation within the last 5 hours shows that this guys could run the company into the ground within blink of an eye.

Remember, some weeks ago Cloudflare had an outage because of an extremely stupid engineering mishap, today it is an extremely stupid leadership mishap. How many more strikes should they be granted?

They are not threatening customers. They are minimizing liability.

If Italians have no influence over AGCOM, then who does?

When you fine a company more than the entire revenue they get from your nation, they will pull out. It is not retributive. What is hard to understand about that?

Folks tend to forget what private enterprise is and think these companies have to provide these services like their government's public service.

That is an important perspective. I was looking at it from the angle of cloudflare's overall revenue, not their revenue from just Italy. I think if he would have said that in his post it would have been much more powerful.

> That's punishing all of Italy's users including those whose job it is to call truth to power

Cloudflare is a business. If the fines for operating are several times the money it can get from Italian users, why should it stay in Italy at all?

It's like when Wikipedia went dark for a day. It punished all users, but the point is to show that politicians are forcing it to do so.

> If my state had a similar spat with Cloudflare would we be in danger of losing the infrastructure we've grown to depend on?

Absolutely. And if any of their competitors claims they can guarantee that they won't ever (have to) pull out somewhere for political reasons, they're lying or ignorant. You cannot escape politics. One election or new law can redraw the landscape overnight.

Also I doubt you "depend" on any single SaaS product where you're completely at the mercy of another company. There's probably nothing that you couldn't swap out in a pinch.

Exactly, I can't believe the braindead takes being spouted on this thread. Is HN really filled with people that can't think critically the second they leave their terminal?

Sure but we're a nonprofit operating on shoestring budget, and given that we've had a web presence since the aughts without having to deal with CEO temper tantrums says a lot about where this kind of attitude stands. If you think somebody who runs an international company is behaving appropriately by bitching and threatening on twitter than I fear for your infra more than I fear for mine.

Cloudflare's job is not to call truth to power. Cloudflare's job is to make money.

Voglio vederti ricevere una multa di 14 milioni di euro e rimanere diplomatico

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