Court Upholds Piracy Blocking Order Against Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS Resolver

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• "Sorry, Italy, but you can't use our DNS. If you don't like it, get a better government"

  • Re:

    It's just not dns, cloudflare protects most websites from ddos attacks etc..
    If they stopped the network from touching italy at all, the internet there would be completely crippled.

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      Sounds like something the Italians should tell their government they don't want.

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        Yandex, run by Russians who care not for western copyright regimes is the place to search for the 123 movies type sites that dissapeared from other search engines. It also appears to mostly have the pre-2016 web in terms of raw search results. Still I don't trust it...

        https://youtu.be/hxloU6vX3yw [youtu.be]

  • by youngone ( 975102 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2022 @08:57PM (#63040021)

    Italy has been trying that three times a year since world War II. You'd think they'd give up, but they're an odd bunch.

    • Italy is a very democratic country. They have more elections than the rest of Europe combined.

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          In a democracy one doesn’t “let” and one accepts the outcome irrespective of whether one agrees with the outcome or not. Fascists are the ones that undermine the outcome and punishes the people when they don’t bring desired results to assert their will.

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        I thought Italy still used a king?

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          Have you been frozen since 1946? Italy hasn't had a king in 76 years now.

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  That would kill Cloudflare, not Italy. Most of Cloudflare's bread and butter is acting as a front end for client websites. No business in their right mind would trust Cloudflare ever again if Cloudflare started blocking access to those businesses from countries because it fell foul of its local laws running an unrelated public DNS resolver.

  A better option might be to block 1.1.1.1 from Italy.

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    That's complete nonsense. Perhaps you're Italian or something.

    Refusing to have Italian websites as clients would force Italian companies wanting a reliable web presence to hire 3rd parties in another European country to administer their websites. And most of them would do so. Cloudflare would lose very little business.

    Compared to the cost of geolocating DNS responses before responding to them, it would probably be cheap. This isn't some small matter; they would probably have to increase their DNS datacenter

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    What does that have to do with Cloudflare DNS?

    (Answer: Nothing)

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  In corp vs government, I believe the traditional response is:
  1. Respond with lawyers keeping it tied up in litigation as a delaying tactic.
  2. Put out feelers and learn the appropriate member of the government to bribe and make this go away. And then, make it go away.
  3. In the press, leave a vague impression that the people acting against the corp won, so as to head off investigation of the purchased legislation by making the story boring. And besides, news outlets are much more vulnerable to ddos attacks

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  Citation needed

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    I think the OP intended sarcasm.

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  This wouldn't even make a top 100 list of crazy Italian court rulings in the past decade.

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  this is political. from tfa:

  so it's not about blocking any traffic (let alone effectively) nor about stopping any "piracy" (it won't), but about showing tech providers who owns the courts (and thus is the boss). not that those companies will get anything out of it, on the contrary, it's just waste of money, buy for their epeen they can happily spend that kind of money and then some!

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  Because 85 year old judges know Jack Shit about how the internet works.

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  In Australia, ISPs block sites via DNS, which is easily circumvented by using a third party DNS. Which is presumably what they are trying to prevent here.
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• Because it's possible to host hundreds of websites on a single IP, and this is an extremely common configuration due to the cost and scarcity of legacy IPv4. With IPv6 it becomes practical to use unique IPs per site again.

  If the site you're trying to block happens to use shared hosting, or a shared CDN etc - you could end up blocking huge numbers of legitimate sites along with it.

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    Because it's possible to host hundreds of websites on a single IP, and this is an extremely common

    It is ALSO possible to host hundreds or thousands of websites and services on a single DNS name, and this is also extremely common particularly in shared web hosting using URL schemes such as "blogspot.com/Username" for example, and the Hosting of DNS zones themselves... Blocking a DNS service disrupts many services unrelated the web, such as DNS and email - It may even prevent the delivery of legal notic

    • Re:

      DNS tends to be owned by a single entity with the owner having direct control over who uses it. The server serving pages does it directly and serves content according to a system the domain owner has set up, it doesn't forward the requests. Interestingly that's less true of an IP - very often the IP owner is an infrastructure company operating a reverse proxy that then forwards HTTP(S) requests to the real server.

      An example of a company that does the IP sharing thing? Well, uh, Cloudflare!

      I'm not sayin

• Re: Why DNS?

  Didn't the summary say they've already been blocked by the ISPs?

  Sounds like the govt is looking for a precedent to point to for some future use: the fight against "Disinformation," hate speech, anti-Environmental organizing, or whatever else the elites decide they don't like the normals knowing about.

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  They did, "three domains that are already blocked by ISPs in Italy following an order from local regulator AGCOM".

  As for why they think that isn't enough, I don't know.

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  Ah Italy, the new China.

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    Really? I would think trying to restrict outside of jurisdiction is United States claim to fame. Aren't they still acting as the world Police nobody asked for?

    What's China trying to restrict from the rest of the world? As far as I can know china is famous for doing business with just about anybody

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        Nothing could be further from the truth. my Mother was a US Army secretary, my father US Army enlisted, following that that held the Officer's rank of Captain in The USAF stationed 8 floors underground at STRATCOM under Offutt Air Force Base.

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      Accusing other countries of doing what the US is doing themselves is also a very notorious American trait.

      As Democrats like to say, "Every Republican accusation is a confession", what the Democrats failed to realize is that applies to all Americans as well.

      Every American accusation is a confession.

    • Re:

      Might want to ask the Chinese about the Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities they are using as slave labor. And whose children they take to educate as Chinese and punish the parents if they don't fall in line as they work to totally destroy their culture and language. Or maybe the conquered people of Tibet. Seem to recall a lot of saber rattling at Mongolia and Taiwan too. That enough 'what's China trying to' for you, or do you need more?

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  Or for that matter: Just stop selling services in Italy, so the courts there have no jurisdiction and No authority over their company, then leave 1.1.1.1 open and disregard blocking orders.

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  • Re:

    First of all, Cloudflare offers DNS as a free service. It sells plenty of services in Italy that are actually revenue generating.

    Second, Italian court would likely be able to escalate the order to EU wide due to non-compliance.

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      If Cloudflare pulled the service sites pay for from Italian sites, Italy loses its entire technology sector overnight. 2nd, there is no reason Cloudflare needs to provide DNS resolution to Italian IPs. Problem solved for everyone other than the Italian businesses who lose their websites and IT services overnight and the government that gets to enjoy getting blamed for it. I doubt it would take a week for them to come crawling back and I doubt losing 1 week of their revenue from Italy would even be a roun

      • I can tell that you don't understand anything about the legal system. Private entity playing chicken with large sovereign actor who has a valid court order ends in tears. And not for the sovereign actor.

        Acting the way you suggest would immediately cause two things. First every single major and medium sized company world wide would order their CTO to conduct complete severance of any and all contracts with Cloudflare in a prompt manner without risking contractual fines, as risk of sudden cessation of services is an unacceptable risk and cloudflare would have demonstrated that it's willing to risk your business on idiocy of "we got a legal order and we didn't want to comply". This is a clear message that this is not a corporation that you would trust running an ice cream kiosk for you, much less critical infrastructure of any kind.

        Second it would cause the case to escalate to contractual severance statutes for impacted services in Italy, with many companies immediately suing cloudflare for interruption of service for reasons of legal noncompliance with nation state law. This is a open and shut case, the moment lawyer walks in and states "yes your honor, they broke the contract because they had a verdict against them in this very legal system, and they openly refused to comply, causing us to lose service, here's the court verdict from that case", you're just done in the court and looking at maximum contractual damages. This would rapidly propagate across interconnected economic system, with cloudflare having to either pay heavy contractual fines to everyone at once, which would be a severe hit to their cash reserves, or face confiscation of property such as servers across EU as warrants are served. Which would rapidly propagate more outages and contract breakage clauses, with no ability to argue force majore as "we refused to comply with a legal order of a court of law and therefore caused these problems" automatically nullifies this argument in its entirety in any reasonable court.

        All this over a free service that brings zero revenue. So the far more likely scenario should someone as ignorant as you ever get to be a CEO of cloudflare is that within the hour of making this decision public, you would have two security guards escort you off the company property as the relevant corporate organ responsible for overseeing the CEO would publish a very public apology for "CEO having a severe nervous breakdown", noting that "we're looking to get him all the mental help he needs in this hard time for him" and ending in "of course we'll follow and any all legal obligations as required by Italian legal system".

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        • Re:

          And said CTO would either a) tell the legal council to F*off, we are not taking down all our Internet sites or b) do what you suggest and be fired a week later when their revenue is down to 0. So no, nobody outside of Italy would do a thing.

          I'm sure there are clauses in there when governments interfere with the contract. Cloudflare would be cancelling their contracts due to inability to deliver services due to Italian law. Those businesses are then going to complain to the government as to why their cont

          • Re:

            >And said CTO would either a) tell the legal council to F*off, we are not taking down all our Internet sites

            Legal forwards the answer to CEO and board of directors. CTO is terminated with cause within an hour (no severance pay). Next CTO does as is told.

            >do what you suggest and be fired a week later when their revenue is down to 0.

            Cloudflare is neither a monopoly in its field, nor a provider of something that cannot be replaced on a decent schedule. It would just increase costs.

            >I'm sure there are

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  • Re:

    Hate to break it to you, but if they have the capability to block all of Italy from accessing their DNS, they could also narrow their block of the specific websites to only affect Italy instead,

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      Hate to break it to you, but stopping selling services in Italy doesn't require any technical changes to the DNS at all. It is something that the humans can implement.

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  People don't have a clue what you're talking about. Not only would this not force a change of government, but it wouldn't even make it on the agenda for any election.

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  This.

  Cloudflare does not make revenue from 1.1.1.1 - it is actually a cost center. They may write it off as a marketing expense, who knows - but it does not make then revenue in Italy so I don't see why they just don't block all access to their resolver there.

• Re:

  As long as Cloudflare has a legal presence in Italy (or the EU), it can be compelled. It's in the court's jurisdiction. Blocking everything would be a satisfactory but unnecessarily broad implementation of the order, as long as that includes the named domains and is effective in all of Italy. The latter part is the problem though. Blocking a few domains everywhere is much easier than reliably blocking everything just in Italy.

• Re:

  If it is feasible for Cloudflare to block all access from Italy, then it is not unreasonable for Italy to demand that specific access from Italy be blocked.

  Italy is nowhere demanding that access be blocked outside of Italy.

• by sfcat ( 872532 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2022 @09:59PM (#63040115)

  Not until you pay reparations for the occupation of England.

  I'm pretty sure the UK won't want to play that game. They would owe about 1/3 of the planet if they did.