A wolf in sheep's clothing. Cloudflare care about the "open internet" exactly as far as they can profit from it. Why does the "open internet" not allow this polity the right to block itself from that which it deems as harmful?
The regulator fined them for not hacking DNS to the whims of the media companies in Italy that want to clamp down on piracy by altering the way DNS works. DNS. The actual "open internet"
I think you may have this backwards.
To me it seems like something they should talk to local Italian ISPs about, not Cloudflare.
But cloudflare do block things. They tend to block things as a rule the American government wants blocking.
The problem is they want to be the people who choose what gets blocked, rather than elected governments.
To me, this whole thing is crazy, certainly pull out if you like, but I'm shocked how many people seem to be siding with the profit-making company over an elected government.
I can confirm that. Got blocked due to a frivolous report. Cloudflare blocked me and categorized my site as phishing. (censoring me from anyone that uses their systems to browse)
No support. No responses to emails or requests for a review by a human
They also sent a notice to my hosting provider. My hosting provider promptly looked at my site and closed the ticket. It was pretty clear to anyone that the report was malicious.
So yes, Cloudflare censors (to quote Matthew Prince) with "No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency"
Granted this could be just due to lack of staff and support
They requested a worldwide block, as a bolivian citizen I have not voted for any italian government officials.
This article seems heavily biased, ignoring this specific point is really strange.
I guess Bolivian people like to watch soccer live too while that match stream was paid for by an Italian media company. I am not in favour of any of this, but it is easy to defend that request? Legal or fair or not?
If you ignore the fact that the requests that these companies have made previously show incompetence, like when they randomly blocked google drive due to it being used to host copyrighted content. Do you want them randomly disabling CDNs or other sites globally if any user happens to use them for piracy?
