I dislike what is happening but I kind of like that they don't care about the size of Cloudflare and hold them as accountable as they would a small hosting company in Belarus. Blocking entire ranges due to illegal content isn't exactly new, the scale is new.
Again though, I really dislike that it isn't going through the legal system
Why make CloudFlare ultimately responsible though? There are lots of companies between users and the servers providing pirated content. Cloudflare is just one step in the whole chain. Why not eg block Google Chrome?
In any case, blocking Cloudflare was a stupid thing to do. Especially because it didn't anything to solve the actual problem.
I think you're not faithfully trying to adopt their perspective here, even if you don't agree with it (just like me).
They need (in their mind, again I don't agree) to block these sites somehow, as they see it as them "stealing" viewers, judges agree with this. Now, where can the block be done, and have the least amount of collateral?
Cloudflare is not playing ball and turning of the streams, and they appear too quickly to go through court orders all the time. Banning a web browser obviously has a huge scope, so you're effectively left with blocking based IP, DNS or both/either.
Considering they are breaking local laws, and judges feel like something should be done to stop that, the solution they arrived at, regardless of how shit it is, is probably the solution with the least collateral damage, even if it has quite a lot.
Again, I don't agree with the decision, but I can also see from their perspective that they don't have a ton of choices, if we adopt the perspective that it should be stopped somehow.
I think you're not seeing the bigger picture.
Somehow La Liga (a private company) was able to convince the courts that it should be able to ban IPs almost in real-time without any oversight from the law. This is just insane in a modern democracy and only benefitted La Liga. Certainly not the population of Spain for whom the courts work for.
Time has proven what anyone with two brain cells knew already. Blocking IPs was never going to do much to solve the issue. It's a wack-a-mole game. Cloudflare knew this and La Liga did too.
> where can the block be done, and have the least amount of collateral?
Blocking one of the biggest providers of internet infra was anything but "the least amount of collateral". Plenty of companies and services depend on Cloudflare.
When I'm posting this message to Hacker News, I'm the "customer" of this website. I'm not customer of all the intermediate nodes in the chain. So if I were to write something illegal and HN would be irresponsive to takedown requests, the courts could order the IP of HN to be blocked, not some intermediate ISP.
The Digital Markets Act speaks of "conduits" instead of speaking of the specific form the conduits may take. It does not give special rights to someone who forwards IP packets unmodified or to someone who receives IP packets and reissues other IP packets or to someone who changes the IP addresses in the packets. It only cares about the net effect of the transmission, and the fact is that Cloudflare is a conduit with caching.
It the same thing with social media and moderation. We don't have to let them off the hook just because doing the right thing would make them unprofitable.
To make the distinction the LaLiga would want they'd have to inspect every single packet, determine if this is a LaLiga game, determine if it's the current game, and determine if it's a licensed provider. There's a reason section 230 was created in the US.
Do we punish gun manufacturers for someone being shot? Kitchen utensil companies for someone being stabbed? Car manufacturers for car crashes? Road construction companies for human trafficking?
How deep does this go? Is a steel foundry responsible for the stabbing? Is a camera lens manufacturer responsible for illegal porn?
What do you expect cloudflare to actually do about these streams?
