Comment by jsnell
8 months ago
They did fight it in court. They lost.
I'm surprised you're so keen on having big tech companies intentionally ignore court orders and just break the law. Like, it's obviously something none of us should want.
8 months ago
They did fight it in court. They lost.
I'm surprised you're so keen on having big tech companies intentionally ignore court orders and just break the law. Like, it's obviously something none of us should want.
There's a really bad equilibrium where every country (or at least every country big enough to have BigTech workers in their country) figures out they can globally censor the internet by using the assets and people of those companies as leverage. Then we would have Americans having their internet censored by every foreign power except China and Russia, where BigTech have largely left.
And it would all be done under the color of local law.
I see nothing in this article suggesting that the court order is for a global block, rather than a regional one. Do you have a source for that?
Does Cloudflare operate different 1.1.1.1s for each country?
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Why should we not want this when the law is bad? The government should face pushback from all sides when attempting something odious.
It's a democratic country. The voters decide if the laws their government passes are bad or not.
There is actually no evidence this is the case, and there is evidence it is the opposite - that the less voters support something, the more likely it is to pass.
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By what means? Picking one of various parties that all colluded on the laws? Perhaps one that promises to oppose it but then does the opposite? Let's not pretend that voting of all things is an effective means to enact change on specific issues in a representative democracy.
One answers is that this case isn't actually a bad law. This appears to be blatant organized piracy. What's odious about copyright laws? This also appears to be pretty much the gold standard of due process. It's not like somebody submitting automated DMCA requests on videos with silent audio tracks or something. It's a court order for these specific domains, which would have been carefully curated and has been quite literally litigated.
The other answer is that you really don't want big corporations to be ignoring laws they don't like, because odds are pretty good that your list of bad laws doesn't match theirs. Countries have sovereignty. If a company doesn't want to obey those laws, they should not operate in that country. If the law really were bad, the way you'd actually fix this is by the democratic process. That's up to the voters, not foreign corporations.
> One answers is that this case isn't actually a bad law.
It's censoring DNS. That's a bad precedent. The technical capacity to do it shouldn't exist because otherwise it will be used for every other form of censorship, and deprive democratic countries of any moral or technical authority to object when authoritarian countries want to do it.
It will also be ineffective, leading for calls to make it effective, but the only way to do that is totalitarianism. There is no good that comes from setting out on that road.
> The other answer is that you really don't want big corporations to be ignoring laws they don't like, because odds are pretty good that your list of bad laws doesn't match theirs.
Ignoring the law doesn't get them out of paying the penalty, but penalties are meant to be sane, not some Hollywood accounting nonsense where one person watching one illicit stream of a sporting event causes the event organizers six billion dollars in damages. Then if Cloudflare wants to say "yeah, we're not doing that" and just pay the $100,000 dollar fine, it's clear that they're standing on principle -- they're paying $100,000 in exchange for ostensibly nothing -- and there is nothing wrong with that. The purpose of the penalty is to deter the underlying wrongdoing, not to deter civil disobedience. Anyone should be able to say "I am going to suffer the consequences of this because my principles are worth more than the fine" without having some authoritarians ratchet up the penalty to infinity.
> Countries have sovereignty.
Democratic countries have checks and balances. One of the checks and balances is that if you pass a law people don't respect, they don't respect it. Then you have to choose between punishing not the evildoers, but the principled idealists -- or repealing the law.
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> This appears to be blatant organized piracy.
What does online streaming have to do with unsanctioned boating activities.
> What's odious about copyright laws?
Their violation of our rights to freely share and improve on our culture.
> This also appears to be pretty much the gold standard of due process.
This doesn't mean the court's decision is any more defensible.
There is other alternative, such as: get rid of their DNS service entirely, or make a petition for changing these laws.
What good would getting rid of their DNS service do?
Making a petition to change the laws sounds like a great way of achieving nothing. It will certainly not mean you get to ignore the court orders.
Shutting down public DNS in France would be an option (a garbage option that nobody would actually choose in this case and that'd solve nothing, but an option nonetheless). That's not what dmitrygr was asking for though. They want big tech companies to ignore legitimate court orders to protect some scummy football pirate sites.
> a garbage option that nobody would actually choose in this case and that'd solve nothing, but an option nonetheless
It would be the ethically correct option.
Is a non-French company obligated to obey a French court order? I can probably name a few countries where most US companies won't enforce the court order from them
They have paying customers in France/they operate their business in France for a profit. Just because their headquarters aren’t there doesn’t make it a non-French related business.