like, if the direction came down from on high, to copy it ... how few things would have to get flipped on to have roughly the same thing in the united states?
i'd really appreciate an insider's summary. a lot has changed since 2004. probably.
I'd argue it's already been flipped on. Our system just works a little bit differently. Nothing is strictly prohibited via some grand theatrical firewall. Things that are "undesirable" simply meet an information theoretical death sooner than they otherwise should. We've got mountains of tools like DMCA that can precision strike anything naughty while still preserving an illusion of freedom.
Data hoarders are the American version of climbing over the GFW. The strategy of relying on entropy to kill off bad narratives seems to be quite effective. Social media platforms, cloud storage, et. al., are dramatically accelerating this pressure.
The Great Firewall is, among various other things, an attempt to create a single historical narrative for the PRC by blocking out reference to things like Tiananmen, discussions of early twentieth-century China suggesting that China could have gone a different way than the Communist Party and prospered, etc. The USA has absolutely nothing like that, people can readily find open-web and social-media content taking every possible position on American history, both staid academic content and wacko conspiracy theory stuff.
When it all comes down to it, the USA just isn’t as hung up on social harmony and narrative control as the PRC. That’s why there isn’t a comparable system in place, and claiming that the odious DMCA is anywhere close, is hyperbole.
Read up on the motivations behind the TikTok acquisition, or the attempts to legislatively censor certain topics on Wikipedia, or the myriad of knobs used by social media “content review” teams etc, or Chat Control in the EU, or going back further, the surveillance systems detailed in the Snowden leaks (why surveil if censorship isn’t the goal?).
It’s ultimately exactly the same reasoning as that used by the CCP, but in a more subtle and gradual manner. Yes, right now, the GFW is a different beast, but if we do nothing, I would wager that the solutions will converge.
https://time.com/7015026/meta-facebook-zuckerberg-covid-bide...
Misinformation or not, I like form my opinions myself, rather than have the government do it for me. There was absolutely a lot of nonsense[1] going around during covid, but constantly being told what to believe felt extremely irksome.
A good example is how payment processors (mainly the major credit card companies) police adult sites, forcing them to ban certain keywords. It's a weird situation in which the role of morality police is played at the point where control can naturally be exercised in a capitalist economy.
As we'd expect, that same pattern is repeated elsewhere, e.g. in social networks that censor in all sorts of ways, many of them explicitly intended to reinforce the status quo and neutralize or undermine dissent.
When you have an authoritarian government, all of this tends to happen more centrally. But democracies tend to distribute this function throughout the economy and society.
The first part is GFW, with which people outside of China is more familiar. It operates at every international internet cable, analyzing and dynamically blocks traffic in realtime. China only have few sites that connects to international internet, with very limited bandwidth (few Tbps in total), so it's more feasible. But overall speaking, this is the easy part.
The second part of walling a garden is about controlling what's inside the garden. Every website running in China mainland needs an ICP license from the government, which can take weeks. ISPs must be state-owned (there are 4 of them in total, no local small ISPs whatsoever). Residential IPs cannot be used for serving websites because the inbound traffic of well-known ports are blocked, which is required by the law. VPN apps are illegal. etc. These are things that are much harder to do in other countries.
That being said, they’re absolutely right that these broad, automated blocks aren’t acceptable for the internet as a whole - especially when a ruling is applicable regionally or globally. Blocking an entire IP range or service provider because of a handful of bad actors on their service is incredibly excessive, akin to barricading off an entire neighborhood because one apartment is a crack den, i.e. stupidly disproportionate. If countries are having an issue with a company routinely and willfully allowing bad actors to prosper, the solution is simply to bar that company from operating within their jurisdiction commercially.
Yet the IT dinosaur in me reads that statement above, and I ultimately find myself back at where I’ve been for years: for a globally distributed network, the only way to effectively punish an operator like Cloudflare is to block its entire IP range, despite the harms innocent customers and users will incur. And I can’t quite figure out a way past that under the current piecemeal system of the internet and the financial incentives for consolidation and centralization.
We have to punish bad actors, but when said actor commands a significant swath of the legitimate internet, you either have to harm a disproportionate amount of legitimate traffic in blocking them, or admit they’re too big and important for a government to intervene against. The former is bad, but the latter is infinitely worse.
The centralization of power is the problem, and as I say near the end:
> …I can’t quite figure out a way past that under the current piecemeal system of the internet and the financial incentives for consolidation and centralization.
The root problem of course is their de facto monopoly status, as gatekeepers of the internet (if they aren't secretly an NSA run company, the NSA is probably very jealous of what they've done), but this would be so much worse if they decided to play internet editor.
And you’re covering the ground I already laid in the original comment:
> …the only way to effectively punish an operator like Cloudflare is to block its entire IP range, despite the harms innocent customers and users will incur. And I can’t quite figure out a way past that under the current piecemeal system of the internet and the financial incentives for consolidation and centralization.
I don’t need eSplaining of my own argument.
1. They have a moderately generous free tier, which they'll aggressively try to upsell you out of the moment they smell money in your wallet.
2. They have an anti-censorship policy that is indistinguishable from the policies of a "bulletproof" hosting company, which means all the DDoS vendors they protect you from are also paying Cloudflare.
This leads me to believe that Cloudflare's protection is less "stringent defense of free speech" and more "you wouldn't want something to happen to that precious website of yours, right?" Like, there's no free speech argument for keeping DDoS vendors online - it's a patently obvious own goal. If someone is selling censorship as a service, then it's obvious, at least to me, that silencing them and them alone would actually make others more free to speak.
In this case, hitting a massive number of small sites, which aren't engaged in piracy, to protect a few large entities from some other small piracy sites. It's what's happening in both Italy and Spain.
It's funny that as soon as anything European (not even related to EU one bit) is mentioned, people find a way of pinning it on the European Union. The article has literally nothing to do with EU, and everything to do with individual European countries, yet you somehow found a way of blaming EU for it :)
Sincerely, Spanish internet user who gets blocked from half the internet every time a semi-popular football match is played in this country.
Living in the US, I've noticed many Americans don't really make distinctions like that. They see "EU" as a kind of shorthand for "Europe", or something along those lines. Even the fact that the UK is no longer in the EU doesn't affect this - it's still part of what Americans think of as "the EU".
See the gears grind to a halt when they are reeducated on the concepts of "Central AMERICA" and "South AMERICA".
People often get confused by divisions like this because they feel like they should be real in an objective sense, but continents are almost entirely social constructs. (There is a North American tectonic plate, and that's real, but it doesn't quite line up with the continent)
Want to avoid confusion? Call it something like "United Nations", 'UN'. Confusion solved, Americans happy, call off the tariffs, peace, etc.
If you substitute the GP for 'pretty typical European play' it makes plenty of sense.
> If you substitute the GP for 'pretty typical European play' it makes plenty of sense.
Not sure even this makes sense, it's not something that is happening Europe wide, and it seems like there is only two countries so far that been engaging in this, with another one thinking about it. For something to be a "pretty typical European play" I'd probably say it has to have happened more times than "twice".
You mean like that nasty EU law called the DMCA?
</s> (just in case)
EU is literally about removing protections for established interests: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e...
I assume you must be American. I always find it funny that there is that US belief that Europe is "old-fashioned" with "old tech" and "old progress". I never encountered anyone yet to tell me what progress wasn't in Europe that was in the US.
I actually think this is a bit backward, with US lack of transportation funding, more people struggling with poverty, backward ecological measures, and missing health care with lower life expectancy.
Likely, the country that wanted to do this finds themselves isolated on their own network, not their target isolated from the internet. Even if that country as is large and powerful as the United States. Perhaps the answer might have been different, 20 years ago or even 15, but everything has changed and there's no going back.
And when other countries don't play ball? Then we shut down those backbones, and it's the United States that is isolate, not Russia (though please feel free to pick another target if you don't like Russia). No one's cutting off China, not without their economy dropping dead. Sure, maybe there's some country that you could do this to... but that country is so unimportant that they're probably already almost-cut-off anyway. You don't even get to to do this to a Brazil or Indonesia, let alone any country that matters.
Countries like Russia or China spend billions on controlling the flow of information on their own land. Countries like Iran go out of their way to blackhole the traffic whenever any disruptions or political violence happens in the country, and for every Nepal, where this backfired terribly, there's a dozen cases of countries doing that and getting away with it. And you're proposing we just help the authoritarians out by doing their dirty work for them.
Sure, let's do that! Give their propagandists a win, leave everyone who's in those countries now hang out to dry in an information black hole! Let the abuses perpetuated by their own governments go unseen and unheard! All to preserve the Good Web, For Good People Only.
Because if it's allowed to exist, it ends up subsumed by political and corporate interests, and becomes a tool of overreach and abuse. We've seen that happen over and over again.
If US Trade Office can be leveraged to destroy internet censorship efforts in other countries, then so be it.
...But, of course, US corporations enforcing the same kind of censoring is a-OK, because corporations are people and their censorship is free speech.
I'll be open to your posititon the day Boticelli's Venus doesn't get censored on FB because there's a pair of tits somewhere on the painting.
This is the same as blocking content on your own forum or comment section on your blog. Yes fb is huge, but still just a website, and one with fading popularity.
Blocking ips on a network level is different.
People use FB because other people use it. There's a lot more complexity, and algorithm fuled habits. But in the end, FB provides the service of communication and content recommendations. Using that attention, it can sell ads. Without that willingness to give attention, they can't sell ads. There are no significant hurdles to starting a social media site.
Credit card processors facilitate payments from one group to a different group. They aren't an endpoint, they are middle men. They don't need to court the attention of users, they are in a position of power it where they can interfere with the lives of others, and have formed a coalition with a total monopoly over the digital trade of money.
If I never use FB, I can still interact with friends, family, buy and sell ads. If I never use a credit card... I've been cut off from the vast majority of the things that I would buy.
It's reasonable for different rules to apply to groups with vastly different powers. I wouldn't expect Google to be held to the same standard that I hold PG&E. Nor would I hold PG&E to the same restrictions I'd place on Google.
You made that up, or you checked stats?
A quick Google says that Facebook is still growing at about 5% and that Meta revenue is up a lot.
blocking that interferes with access to legitimate sites that i might use to buy or sell products and communicate with potential customers should be a violation of these agreements.
Most international trade agreements don't cover services in in a comprehensive manner. Because they are so varied and difficult to regulate. E.g. banking, sales, advice, software.
For Cloudflare it's obviously of commerical interest to establish a world wide level playing field.
I don't see it happening. Certainly not because of US trade interests. Because there is a serious lack of good will towards the USA, basically anywhere in the (rest of the) world right now, and services are a much bigger part of the economy than manufacted produce.
The trend I see is to decouple from the US, and China.
I genuinely couldn't reccomend my own country to make a deal with the USA on services. Because we already have a serious issue with the dominance of US cloud tech.
If you want the benefits of the internet you must open your country for foreign influence and destabilizing rot!
I think the idea that we need to take or leave the whole internet without compromise is flawed.
if I was the EU I would have responded to the threats of goods tariffs with a threat of service tariffs that will start off slow and increase every month that tariffs remain in effect
initially 0% tax on Office 365/AWS/facebook+google ad sales, then after a year it's 20%, and so-on
giorgioz•2h ago
I decided to go back to AWS.
Frankly Cloudflare is choosing the wrong battle on defending pirate streaming websites. There are other gray areas that I apprecciate Cloudflare defending freedom of speech online, but pirate streaming websites aren't one of those.
hypeatei•1h ago
benatkin•56m ago
ronsor•1h ago
freedomben•1h ago
ivl•1h ago
And it wasn't a Spanish government policy, but rather a single judge's order.
bell-cot•1h ago
sidewndr46•1h ago
benatkin•1h ago
Cloudflare does provide APIs to look up security threats by IP addresses that could help with DDOS, and I wouldn't consider that hosting: https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/intel/subres...
hsbauauvhabzb•1h ago
blitzar•1h ago
sidewndr46•1h ago
ACCount37•49m ago
How cheap, I wonder, does a government have to be to sell itself out over ball game broadcasting rights? Could someone like Elon Musk just fly in there and acquire the entire government with some pocket change?
sidewndr46•8m ago