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Comment by alecsm

4 months ago

Right now if you want to use internet on weekends you need to pay a VPN.

Even some online games on Steam stop working. I've seen also a several Twitch streamers who can't stream, startups down, etc.

We're basically hostages of this stupidity. And you know the funny thing? Football streams are working just fine. Now I feel morally obligated to watch pirated football and never pay them for it.

They are stupid enough that they block almost no ipv6 range. So if your provider has ipv6, you're relatively safe.

That’s insane. Do citizens not have a recourse? Like maybe a freedom of speech constitutional angle?

  • There's one recourse in the Constitutional Court driven by Clouflare and RootedCON but the thing about the Constitutional Court is that it can be very slow and it's heavily politicized and I'm not really sure the government position on this. Right now, only one leftist Catalan party has said anything against the blocks in the Congress. Also many mass media are not reporting this issues because they're also an interested party.

  • So many people may not realize that this sort of thing has happened and does happen in the US.

    Some may not know how large ISPs connect to each other. If you're sufficiently large, you basically get to peer for "free". There are common peering points where most of this happens. Now, how does traffic travel between ISPs? WWell, routing protocols (notably BGP4) dictate how these connetions are used.

    Thing is, providers can directly and indirectly throttle traffic with all this. A famous example is where several US ISPs, notably Verizon FiOS (from my own experience) to Netflix. There was a time about a decade ago where in the evening you could get <500kbps and Netflix was unwatchable. Verizon alternated between denying it and saying it was a technical limitation.

    But lo and behold if you just used a VPN to bypass Verizon's routing and peering Netflix was completely watchable.

    Many believe (myself included) this was intentional to try and kill Netflix and prop up their declining cable TV business.

    • It was intentional - on Netflix’s part. They intentionally picked a partner with little or no peering agreements, and then started dumping terabits of traffic on “peers” and demanding peering agreements.

  • Freedom of speech, in the strong form that is most familiar in the US, is largely not a thing in other countries.

  • We have the freedom to say we're against it. The system is rotten to the core and run by people detached from reality.

I keep seeing this rhetoric, but every time I use a vpn for non piracy stuff I’m captcha’d to hell. Is my experience somehow different from most?

  • The more widely used a VPN the more aggresively it's captcha’d, use a paid less known VPN and the experience improves dramatically

  • If the experience is everything is blocked or everything is captcha hell, the latter still sounds like an improvement. I personally have no need for a VPN so I don’t know what the internet is like with one, but it does sound like without one the internet is essentially blocked.

They could also make the sport more affordable to watch again.

  • Football clubs have a billion eurodollar budget that they need to pay for. And how do they do that? With TV licensing.

    I live in the Netherlands and everyone here has accepted that a Dutch club will never again get into a Championship League finale. Every Dutch star is playing in Spain or England.

    • "The European football ecosystem is already dead but it doesn't know it yet."

      It's not sustainable and has to pop, but god damn is is resilient, even if it's kind of artificially.

      1 reply →

    • At least in the US, there are minor league / feeder teams that are much cheaper to watch. Going to the stadium for a game is essentially free, and actually enjoyable, since getting tickets and entering the stadium isn’t like dealing with the airlines/tsa, but worse.

      You’re still supporting the mob though.

      2 replies →

> now if you want to use internet on weekends you need to pay a VPN.

Weekends? Do they specifically block the internet (or at least the websites mentioned in the article - GitHub, etc.) on weekends?

Blocking Cloudflare seems insane. That's a huge portion of the internet (for better or worse).

  • The games are presumably on the weekend. This is abou blocking streaming of games that are currently happening.

Maybe that’s the point? So that you have to watch soccer on TV?

The purpose of a system is what it does, after all.