I received a tag from @TomSeppert - whom I thank - pointing me to the latest post on X by the CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince.
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I received a tag from @TomSeppert - whom I thank - pointing me to the latest post on X by the CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince. Long story short, the Italian AGCOM has fined Cloudflare a very large amount because, according to them, the company did not implement adequate measures to reduce the impact of piracy in Italy. Prince responded with a very aggressive post, threatening to shut down Cloudflare servers and free services in Italy, and to stop providing “pro bono” services for the Milan-Cortina Olympics.
I understand Matthew Prince’s outrage. I cannot really quantify the impact of piracy in Italy, but I know for a fact that, because of a ridiculous law, whenever we buy any kind of storage device like SSDs, NVMe drives, hard disks, and so on, we pay a substantial tax because we might "potentially" use them to store copyrighted material. This has always made me furious. It is a law that dates back to the era of blank CDs and DVDs, and while it was already questionable back then, today it is simply absurd. At the time, we fought hard against its approval, but to no avail.
Unfortunately, in Italy there are some very powerful interests at play. Among them are the rights related to football matches. And all of this starts there. If there is one reason why football is among the sports I dislike the most, it is also because of this: the flow of money, power, and white-collar crime behind it has disgusted me since I was a child.
That said, if Matthew Prince had expressed all of this in a different way, I would have fully agreed with him. Far too often, "security" is used as an excuse for censorship on the Internet. But the wording, the tone, the threats, and the overall attitude really bothered me. Threats always sound bad, especially when they come from the head of one of the most critical companies on the Internet.
And once again, I feel the need to repeat it: the Internet must remain decentralized.
Our freedom cannot and must not depend on lobbies, but neither on a small group of enormous companies.
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M mjack@mastodon.bsd.cafe shared this topic
