Court Upholds Piracy Blocking Order Against Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS Resolver 101
The Court of Rome has confirmed that Cloudflare must block three torrent sites through its public 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. The order applies to kickasstorrents.to, limetorrents.pro, and ilcorsaronero.pro, three domains that are already blocked by ISPs in Italy following an order from local regulator AGCOM. TorrentFreak reports: Disappointed by the ruling, Cloudflare filed an appeal at the Court of Milan. The internet infrastructure company doesn't object to blocking requests that target its customers' websites but believes that interfering with its DNS resolver is problematic, as those measures are not easy to restrict geographically. "Because such a block would apply globally to all users of the resolver, regardless of where they are located, it would affect end users outside of the blocking government's jurisdiction," Cloudflare recently said. "We therefore evaluate any government requests or court orders to block content through a globally available public recursive resolver as requests or orders to block content globally." At the court of appeal, Cloudflare argued that DNS blocking is an ineffective measure that can be easily bypassed, with a VPN for example. In addition, it contested that it is subject to the jurisdiction of an Italian court.
Cloudflare's defenses failed to gain traction in court and its appeal was dismissed. DNS blocking may not be a perfect solution, but that doesn't mean that Cloudflare can't be compelled to intervene. [...] Cloudflare believes that these types of orders set a dangerous precedent. The company previously said that it hadn't actually blocked content through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver. Instead, it implemented an "alternative remedy" to comply with the Italian court order.
Cloudflare's defenses failed to gain traction in court and its appeal was dismissed. DNS blocking may not be a perfect solution, but that doesn't mean that Cloudflare can't be compelled to intervene. [...] Cloudflare believes that these types of orders set a dangerous precedent. The company previously said that it hadn't actually blocked content through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver. Instead, it implemented an "alternative remedy" to comply with the Italian court order.
Solution (Score:1, Interesting)
Block Italy from cloudflare
Re:Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
"Sorry, Italy, but you can't use our DNS. If you don't like it, get a better government"
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It's just not dns, cloudflare protects most websites from ddos attacks etc..
If they stopped the network from touching italy at all, the internet there would be completely crippled.
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Sounds like something the Italians should tell their government they don't want.
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Yandex, run by Russians who care not for western copyright regimes is the place to search for the 123 movies type sites that dissapeared from other search engines. It also appears to mostly have the pre-2016 web in terms of raw search results. Still I don't trust it...
https://youtu.be/hxloU6vX3yw [youtu.be]
Re: Solution (Score:1)
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How many Italians will care? The majority of those who bothered to go to the polls recently did already tell the election administration what they want, they made fascists the ruling party (yes, the real thing, the word and the political movement originated in Italy exactly 100 years ago and these people are in that same tradition).
Re:Solution (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Solution (Score:5, Funny)
Italy is a very democratic country. They have more elections than the rest of Europe combined.
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Yes, that's what fascists will actually do—if and when society lets them win elections, and it will only be the start. Europe's early 20th century history seems to be completely forgotten in many people.
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Those Fascists have been undermining the outcome of elections and punishing the people when they didn't bring desired results since World War II with the help of the CIA and NATO.
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I thought Italy still used a king?
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Have you been frozen since 1946? Italy hasn't had a king in 76 years now.
Re: Solution (Score:2)
It's a joke from the TV show Archer.
https://archer.fandom.com/wiki... [fandom.com]
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Look, I'm sorry alright? I don't make the rules.
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Re:Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
That's complete nonsense. Perhaps you're Italian or something.
Refusing to have Italian websites as clients would force Italian companies wanting a reliable web presence to hire 3rd parties in another European country to administer their websites. And most of them would do so. Cloudflare would lose very little business.
Compared to the cost of geolocating DNS responses before responding to them, it would probably be cheap. This isn't some small matter; they would probably have to increase their DNS datacenter resources by 10x globally to comply with this ruling in a way that only had minimal performance degradation. It's a huge lift to add that sort of processing to something that is normally done very simply and is heavily cached. They'd probably have to develop custom ASICs just for this one feature, and deploy all their DNS loads to them. It's crazy the expense of this request, if you assume that performance needs to be maintained.
Re:Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of Cloudflare's bread and butter is acting as a front end for client websites.
What does that have to do with Cloudflare DNS?
(Answer: Nothing)
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1. Respond with lawyers keeping it tied up in litigation as a delaying tactic.
2. Put out feelers and learn the appropriate member of the government to bribe and make this go away. And then, make it go away.
3. In the press, leave a vague impression that the people acting against the corp won, so as to head off investigation of the purchased legislation by making the story boring. And besides, news outlets are much more vulnerable to ddos attacks
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Sir! Are you implying that there is corruption among Italian government officials??
Shocking!
not so giant hosts file (Score:2)
don't need anything so fancy as VPN, a whole world of nameservers will oblige. or host entries.
usually European courts are smarter, hopefully millions show them their idiocy
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usually European courts are smarter
Citation needed
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usually European courts are smarter
Citation needed
I think the OP intended sarcasm.
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usually European courts are smarter, hopefully millions show them their idiocy
This wouldn't even make a top 100 list of crazy Italian court rulings in the past decade.
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don't need anything so fancy as VPN, a whole world of nameservers will oblige. or host entries.
usually European courts are smarter, hopefully millions show them their idiocy
this is political. from tfa:
The dismissal is a win for Sony Music, Warner Music, and Universal, the companies behind the complaint. It’s also seen as a clear victory by Enzo Mazza, CEO of the Italian music industry group FIMI.
(...)
Global music industry group IFPI agrees. According to Chief Executive Frances Moore, the order sets an important precedent.
(...)
“By upholding the original order against CloudFlare, the Court of Milan has set an important precedent that online intermediaries can be required to take effective action if their services are used for music piracy,” Moore notes.
so it's not about blocking any traffic (let alone effectively) nor about stopping any "piracy" (it won't), but about showing tech providers who owns the courts (and thus is the boss). not that those companies will get anything out of it, on the contrary, it's just waste of money, buy for their epeen they can happily spend that kind of money and then some!
Why DNS? (Score:2)
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Re:Why DNS? (Score:4, Insightful)
And litigants asking them to block DNS don't, either.
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Re:Why DNS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's possible to host hundreds of websites on a single IP, and this is an extremely common configuration due to the cost and scarcity of legacy IPv4. With IPv6 it becomes practical to use unique IPs per site again.
If the site you're trying to block happens to use shared hosting, or a shared CDN etc - you could end up blocking huge numbers of legitimate sites along with it.
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Because it's possible to host hundreds of websites on a single IP, and this is an extremely common
It is ALSO possible to host hundreds or thousands of websites and services on a single DNS name, and this is also extremely common particularly in shared web hosting using URL schemes such as "blogspot.com/Username" for example, and the Hosting of DNS zones themselves... Blocking a DNS service disrupts many services unrelated the web, such as DNS and email - It may even prevent the delivery of legal notic
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Re: Why DNS? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sounds like the govt is looking for a precedent to point to for some future use: the fight against "Disinformation," hate speech, anti-Environmental organizing, or whatever else the elites decide they don't like the normals knowing about.
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As for why they think that isn't enough, I don't know.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ah Italy, the new China.
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Really? I would think trying to restrict outside of jurisdiction is United States claim to fame.
Accusing other countries of doing what the US is doing themselves is also a very notorious American trait.
As Democrats like to say, "Every Republican accusation is a confession", what the Democrats failed to realize is that applies to all Americans as well.
Every American accusation is a confession.
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Are you kidding? This is the first time I've heard of one of these coming out of Italy specifically... usually it seems the France is the worst culprit after the US and the first case I personally heard of came out of Spain... but the EU is no stranger to claiming the right to export its laws beyond its borders. It is usually censorship cases like this, with the EU asserting that they have the "right" to legislate what content I can read about on the internet. I don't give a rip if it's about torrenting
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Or for that matter: Just stop selling services in Italy, so the courts there have no jurisdiction and No authority over their company, then leave 1.1.1.1 open and disregard blocking orders.
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First of all, Cloudflare offers DNS as a free service. It sells plenty of services in Italy that are actually revenue generating.
Second, Italian court would likely be able to escalate the order to EU wide due to non-compliance.
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First of all, Cloudflare offers DNS as a free service. It sells plenty of services in Italy that are actually revenue generating.
Second, Italian court would likely be able to escalate the order to EU wide due to non-compliance.
If Cloudflare pulled the service sites pay for from Italian sites, Italy loses its entire technology sector overnight. 2nd, there is no reason Cloudflare needs to provide DNS resolution to Italian IPs. Problem solved for everyone other than the Italian businesses who lose their websites and IT services overnight and the government that gets to enjoy getting blamed for it. I doubt it would take a week for them to come crawling back and I doubt losing 1 week of their revenue from Italy would even be a roun
Re:Exclude Italy from 1.1.1.1 access (Score:5, Interesting)
I can tell that you don't understand anything about the legal system. Private entity playing chicken with large sovereign actor who has a valid court order ends in tears. And not for the sovereign actor.
Acting the way you suggest would immediately cause two things. First every single major and medium sized company world wide would order their CTO to conduct complete severance of any and all contracts with Cloudflare in a prompt manner without risking contractual fines, as risk of sudden cessation of services is an unacceptable risk and cloudflare would have demonstrated that it's willing to risk your business on idiocy of "we got a legal order and we didn't want to comply". This is a clear message that this is not a corporation that you would trust running an ice cream kiosk for you, much less critical infrastructure of any kind.
Second it would cause the case to escalate to contractual severance statutes for impacted services in Italy, with many companies immediately suing cloudflare for interruption of service for reasons of legal noncompliance with nation state law. This is a open and shut case, the moment lawyer walks in and states "yes your honor, they broke the contract because they had a verdict against them in this very legal system, and they openly refused to comply, causing us to lose service, here's the court verdict from that case", you're just done in the court and looking at maximum contractual damages. This would rapidly propagate across interconnected economic system, with cloudflare having to either pay heavy contractual fines to everyone at once, which would be a severe hit to their cash reserves, or face confiscation of property such as servers across EU as warrants are served. Which would rapidly propagate more outages and contract breakage clauses, with no ability to argue force majore as "we refused to comply with a legal order of a court of law and therefore caused these problems" automatically nullifies this argument in its entirety in any reasonable court.
All this over a free service that brings zero revenue. So the far more likely scenario should someone as ignorant as you ever get to be a CEO of cloudflare is that within the hour of making this decision public, you would have two security guards escort you off the company property as the relevant corporate organ responsible for overseeing the CEO would publish a very public apology for "CEO having a severe nervous breakdown", noting that "we're looking to get him all the mental help he needs in this hard time for him" and ending in "of course we'll follow and any all legal obligations as required by Italian legal system".
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Acting the way you suggest would immediately cause two things. First every single major and medium sized company world wide would order their CTO to conduct complete severance of any and all contracts with Cloudflare
And said CTO would either a) tell the legal council to F*off, we are not taking down all our Internet sites or b) do what you suggest and be fired a week later when their revenue is down to 0. So no, nobody outside of Italy would do a thing.
Second it would cause the case to escalate to contractual severance statutes for impacted services in Italy, with many companies immediately suing cloudflare for interruption of service for reasons of legal noncompliance with nation state law.
I'm sure there are clauses in there when governments interfere with the contract. Cloudflare would be cancelling their contracts due to inability to deliver services due to Italian law. Those businesses are then going to complain to the government as to why their cont
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>And said CTO would either a) tell the legal council to F*off, we are not taking down all our Internet sites
Legal forwards the answer to CEO and board of directors. CTO is terminated with cause within an hour (no severance pay). Next CTO does as is told.
>do what you suggest and be fired a week later when their revenue is down to 0.
Cloudflare is neither a monopoly in its field, nor a provider of something that cannot be replaced on a decent schedule. It would just increase costs.
>I'm sure there are
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We're out of cute and cuddly anarcho-libertarian nonsense and well into "I'm ungovernable, antifa for lyfe!" realm.
I'm really not sure what you mean by this. Love to hear how anarcho-libertarians and Antifa are related. They seem to be polar opposites in by my definition, or maybe that's what you are saying? Are you asserting that a private company cannot simply cut ties in a locality that's turned hostile? Do you need a couple dozen examples of that happening to try and rationalize away with some paralegal hand waving?
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Ideologically, both operate on fundamental principle of maximum freedom from oppression at the cost of everything else. The primary ideological difference is that former recognize individuals as independent actors, which enables things like binding contractual obligations between individuals.
Whereas latter (radical communists) do not recognize individuals as such, and only believe in identity groups being such actors. Additionally they believe in Marxist conception of reality that all dialogue between said
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Ah yes, "On the Jewish question". The part that tries to explain Marxist tenet of class consciousness in relationship to Jews of Europe in mid 1800s, and how Jews are special because they are uniquely resistant to adapting class consciousness because they have a culture and a religion that inoculate them against this genocidal world view.
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I'm sorry do you think Cloudflare *is* the internet? Why would your website be offline if you terminated services with them and went to somewhere else?
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would order their CTO to conduct complete severance of any and all contracts with Cloudflare in a prompt manner without risking contractual fines, as risk of sudden cessation of services is an unacceptable risk...
No. Wow, you have an extremely vivid imagination there. The buyer of service believing their service provider has a new risk doesn't change their contract.
with many companies immediately suing cloudflare for interruption of service
No. First of all, Their Terms of service has a No Warranties clau
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The first thing you quoted precluded your objection to it. Your second is irrelevant when dealing with parts that are superceded by national law. You cannot deny things legally guaranteed within total body of law, you can merely argue within the scope of total body of law. Here, you would be arguing that termination of service is because you refused to comply with total body of law. Now imagine being the poor lawyer trying to argue this point in an Italian court.
Italy's justice system has real problems with
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The first thing you quoted precluded your objection to it.
Nonsense.
Your second is irrelevant when dealing with parts that are superceded by national law.
False. The national laws of countries don't have authority over the company that doesn't exist within their boundaries. They only have the police power over the people and properties that are actually inside their country.
If a global provider of service decides to disobey Italian law and removes all their property from that country first, then Italian
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Best part in this argument: a claim that sovereign actors cannot claim sovereign privilege because private party says so in a contract.
I must say, it's rare to see someone so disconnected from real world as you.
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Hate to break it to you, but if they have the capability to block all of Italy from accessing their DNS, they could also narrow their block of the specific websites to only affect Italy instead,
Hate to break it to you, but stopping selling services in Italy doesn't require any technical changes to the DNS at all. It is something that the humans can implement.
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Or for that matter: Just stop selling services in Italy
Before you do that consider if the cost of compliance is more or less than the cost of avoidance. I mean you're talking about not serving a customer base of 60million. What would your shareholders thing, and on top of that, who would you still serve if you packed your bags and fled every time a stupid court decision comes up?
I guess you could provide DNS to some native tribe in central Africa, at least until they have their first court case against you for stupid reasons.
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I mean you're talking about not serving a customer base of 60million.
Not exactly. They would not be losing any business by doing this.. Only the investments that they already made in the past to build datacenter facilities in Italy would be a loss, But they could transfer ownership and operation of the hardware and facilities they have in Italy to a different company, So it's not necessarily a total loss.... In fact, if they chose they could spin off the operation of the 1.1.1.1 DNS service to a
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They can still use standard DNS until the people grow irritated enough to force change from the government, if they ever
People don't have a clue what you're talking about. Not only would this not force a change of government, but it wouldn't even make it on the agenda for any election.
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This.
Cloudflare does not make revenue from 1.1.1.1 - it is actually a cost center. They may write it off as a marketing expense, who knows - but it does not make then revenue in Italy so I don't see why they just don't block all access to their resolver there.
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If it is feasible for Cloudflare to block all access from Italy, then it is not unreasonable for Italy to demand that specific access from Italy be blocked.
Italy is nowhere demanding that access be blocked outside of Italy.
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I just had a conversation with a crypto bro... (Score:2)
will they try to block AWS or GCP due do some (Score:2)
will they try to block AWS or GCP due do some sites on there? Ask them to block X to users in Italy
Court of Rome (Score:4, Insightful)
Not until you pay reparations for the occupation of England.
Re:Court of Rome (Score:4, Insightful)
Not until you pay reparations for the occupation of England.
I'm pretty sure the UK won't want to play that game. They would owe about 1/3 of the planet if they did.
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Some conquerings are just remembered as worse than others.
Granted, the Romans were not the worst conquerors ever.
Apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Appeal to the EU high court (Score:2)
If that doesn't work, simply deny Italy access as others have said.
I'm sure their business in Italy isn't that big a chunk of their revenue.
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If that doesn't work, simply deny Italy access as others have said.
There's nothing simple about suddenly exiting a market of 60million people. That kind of rash decision has the ability to end companies.
This is actually good (Score:1)
Piracy just costs someone or a group an amount of lost sales ($). No one is physically harmed when someone copies data. Some websites actually promote ending lives, like pro abortion websites. Get the precedent set to regulate various parts of the internet (chokepoints of information spreading), and then use it more aggressively in the future. If such blocking could be used for just money, why not use it to save lives?
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I don't think piracy really costs anyone anything, at least not much, because most pirates would probably not purchase the products even if they were unable to pirate them.
You do, however, make the important point that this rabbit hole will probably go much deeper than expected once the precedent is set.
How would happen if the US ordered TikTok blocked? (Score:2)
Would TikTok.com get seized?