Cloudflare Tells U.S. Govt That Foreign Site Blocking Efforts Are Trade Barriers
16 comments
·November 6, 2025ivl
embedding-shape
> But, it's a pretty typical EU play. Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.
It's funny that as soon as anything European (not even related to EU one bit) is mentioned, people find a way of pinning it on the European Union. The article has literally nothing to do with EU, and everything to do with individual European countries, yet you somehow found a way of blaming EU for it :)
Sincerely, Spanish internet user who gets blocked from half the internet every time a semi-popular football match is played in this country.
digitalsushi
i havent been in a tier 1 ISP in 20 years. can anyone who is in that life give a little summary of how much infrastructure we have in the united states to implement the same level of control as what china has available for walling its garden?
like, if the direction came down from on high, to copy it ... how few things would have to get flipped on to have roughly the same thing in the united states?
i'd really appreciate an insider's summary. a lot has changed since 2004. probably.
bob1029
> how few things would have to get flipped on to have roughly the same thing in the united states?
I'd argue it's already been flipped on. Our system just works a little bit differently. Nothing is strictly prohibited via some grand theatrical firewall. Things that are "undesirable" simply meet an information theoretical death sooner than they otherwise should. We've got mountains of tools like DMCA that can precision strike anything naughty while still preserving an illusion of freedom.
Data hoarders are the American version of climbing over the GFW. The strategy of relying on entropy to kill off bad narratives seems to be quite effective. Social media platforms, cloud storage, et. al., are dramatically accelerating this pressure.
HeinzStuckeIt
> I'd argue it's already been flipped on.
This is hyperbole. The Great Firewall is, among various other things, an attempt to create a single historical narrative for the PRC by blocking out reference to things like Tiananmen, discussions of early twentieth-century China suggesting that China could have gone a different way than the Communist Party and prospered, etc. The USA has absolutely nothing like that, people can readily find open web content taking every possible position on American history, both staid academic content and wacko conspiracy theory stuff.
beardyw
"Trade barriers" - mmm, I wonder who's attention they are trying to get.
giorgioz
I hosted a website on Cloudflare and I sent a link to it to a friend on a Sunday. The friend told me the website was down. Turns out Spain blocks IP addresses belonging to Cloudflare during big football matches because some pirate streaming websites are hosted on Cloudflare. https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1nm80wz/trying_to_u...
I decided to go back to AWS.
Frankly Cloudflare is choosing the wrong battle on defending pirate streaming websites. There are other gray areas that I apprecciate Cloudflare defending freedom of speech online, but pirate streaming websites aren't one of those.
hypeatei
That's Spains issue. Spaniards should encourage their government to eliminate whatever nonsensical provision in the law that allows ranges of IPs to be blocked at the service provider level for soccer matches.
ivl
I don't even think that case was from Cloudflare hosting, just providing DDOS protection.
And it wasn't a Spanish government policy, but rather a single judge's order.
bell-cot
"Major consequences M, because of an order by judge J" is not a situation which lasts...unless the government is relatively happy with M.
freedomben
Cloudflare isn't defending the pirate streaming sites, they are simply living their principles of being neutral.
stego-tech
On the one hand, Cloudflare crying crocodile tears for their policy decisions isn’t remotely moving. If anything, their plea for US intervention feels incredibly insincere given that their business has been to defend literal Nazis and Pirates alike for decades, and if you’re going to build a business out of defending bad actors, well, you best be prepared for the consequences.
That being said, they’re absolutely right that these broad, automated blocks aren’t acceptable for the internet as a whole - especially when a ruling is applicable regionally or globally. Blocking an entire IP range or service provider because of a handful of bad actors on their service is incredibly excessive, akin to barricading off an entire neighborhood because one apartment is a crack den, i.e. stupidly disproportionate. If countries are having an issue with a company routinely and willfully allowing bad actors to prosper, the solution is simply to bar that company from operating within their jurisdiction commercially.
Yet the IT dinosaur in me reads that statement above, and I ultimately find myself back at where I’ve been for years: for a globally distributed network, the only way to effectively punish an operator like Cloudflare is to block its entire IP range, despite the harms innocent customers and users will incur. And I can’t quite figure out a way past that under the current piecemeal system of the internet and the financial incentives for consolidation and centralization.
We have to punish bad actors, but when said actor commands a significant swath of the legitimate internet, you either have to harm a disproportionate amount of legitimate traffic in blocking them, or admit they’re too big and important for a government to intervene against. The former is bad, but the latter is infinitely worse.
wbl
The courts can absolutely get Cloudflare to comply with orders. The only reason this doesn't happen is that the people asking for the blocking come with a list of IPs.
tiahura
Backbone operators in the US should not be allowed to connect to networks that connect to low trust countries.
Cloudflare is right. But, it's a pretty typical EU play. Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.
In this case, hitting a massive number of small sites, which aren't engaged in piracy, to protect a few large entities from some other small piracy sites. It's what's happening in both Italy and Spain.