Court of Milan orders Cloudflare to block ‘piracy shield’ domains, IP addresses

[parhamn]

The conversation seems centered on Cloudflare and the broader piracy issue. The more interesting thing to me is that sports are in desperate need of their spotify/netflix moment. My current best guess is that this isn't possible because of existing longer term contracts they've had in place.

Currently streameast and such have the best UI for watching sports games and it's not even close. Casual/nascent fans don't want to pay $100 a month for announcer-less access to sideline camera feeds. I don't want to look up where every game is streaming that week. I don't want a membership to peacock or whatever to see this one game I'm sorta interested in. No I don't have cable anymore either. I don't care to understand how "blackouts" work. It goes on an on.

It seems maliciously bad. And their numbers are showing it. From Gen Z's low adoption rates, to lower rates of onboarding new fans and broadly reduced viewership in some sports like the NBA.

I don't know a single person who pirates music these days.

[badlibrarian]

Watching every NFL game costs around $2,500 and requires six logins. And other leagues are going to follow this model.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/want-to-watch-every-nfl-ga...

[fmajid]

Sports teams and orgs like FIFA are ruthlessly effective at extracting every last cent of value from sports broadcasting rights, to the point it's not profitable for broadcasters/streamers other than ESPN (and even the latter's profitability, once the mainstay of Disney profits, is collapsing). It's a mug's game to play, yet suckers are seemingly born every day, as with Netflix paying

[sureIy]

Why would they? Sports fans need to watch their teams, they will pay whatever they can afford to do so. This is different from Spotify/Netflix, where you don't really need to watch some movie or listen to music (which you can do for free on the radio). And particularly, with those services you don't need to listen/watch it live.

Why would they lower their profits? Even services like YouTube TV eventually catch up in price with regular cable.

[kevincox]

Spotify and the music industry are better, but I don't think the TV and movie industries are much better than sports. Look at this official guide of where to watch Pokemon, it looks like satire.

https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...

This is maybe the most obvious example but ridiculous things like seasons of TV shows being split across different streaming services is incredibly common.

[downrightmike]

I really don't care about watching millionaires play for billionaires, or indentured servitude college students making billions for the NCAA. College sports are a whole other racket that has destroyed our schools

[donmcronald]

For the NHL, I would pay more for the pirate streaming setup I have than I would for SportsNet in Canada. The only thing they have to do to get money from me is offer a product that isn’t absolute trash.

[shlomo_z]

While I do not support piracy, I am worried that the internet will get less and less free as tactics like this become more common.

[athrowaway3z]

While I do support piracy. Services like Cloudflare already locked up most of the free internet you're imagining.

[finnthehuman]

It’s been a foregone conclusion for 10+ years. Piracy is a holdout, not the beginning. Very few people will go to the ends of technical and legal means to stay online.

[doctorpangloss]

On the other hand, where do you draw the line with regards to lawbreaking?

[Reventlov]

Step 1: Don't use CloudFlare MITM as a service

Step 2: Don't get blocked because you're not a streaming pirate service

Really, I see no downside to this court decision.

[Fizzadar]

We really need a competitor(s- ideally) to CF because it’s heavily centralising the internet and this highlights exactly why that is a problem.

[Andoryuuta]

There are multiple competitors though.

See: Azure Front Door, Amazon CloudFront, Google Cloud/Media CDN, Akamai, Fastly, BunnyCDN, and so on.

People are _choosing_ to use Cloudflare, whether that's based on cost, features, or even just brand recognition - but lack of options isn't the case.

[mgbmtl]

I'm all for competition, but smaller players would have been completely blocked by Privacy Shield, whereas they cannot block CloudFlare completely without breaking a lot of other sites.

And CloudFlare went to court. Most companies would not be able to afford it.

[silisili]

The CDN industry is shrinking, not growing. There isn't any margin to play with anymore.

Any viable competitor to Cloudflare is going to have to have big coffers, or take on tons of VC debt up front. Even then, it's a race to the bottom on prices.

[pixelesque]

Maybe, but The Pirate Bay (at least last week when I looked) were sending cf-ray cookies, so I assume CF are "helping"/"protecting" (depending on what service they're using?) them, and The Pirate Bay's sort of been around (despite best efforts by some governments) for years...

[gruez]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS-Guard

Seems like they're willing to take anyone as a client

>Researchers and journalists have alleged that many of DDoS-Guard's clients are engaged in criminal activity, and investigative reporter Brian Krebs reported in January 2021 that a "vast number" of the websites hosted by DDoS-Guard are "phishing sites and domains tied to cybercrime services or forums online".[3][1] Some of DDoS-Guard's notable clients have included the Palestinian Islamic militant nationalist movement Hamas, American alt-tech social network Parler, and various groups associated with the Russian state.[3][4][1]

...including piracy sites

>DDoS-Guard provides services for the popular video game piracy website FitGirl Repacks

>Sci-Hub switched from Cloudflare to DDoS-Guard for DDoS protection.

[neonsunset]

There are! But most have only a small part of marketshare. The issue is less so in services provided and more so in sheer scale. Hopefully that will change eventually :)

[BadHumans]

The article says Cloudflare has tried to geoblock just certain IPs in Italy but what if Cloudflare tells Italy to stuff it and just withdraws from providing services to the country entirely?

[DanAtC]

Cisco did in France: https://support.opendns.com/hc/en-us/articles/27951404269204...

[donor20]

I think fine to order blocking in Italy - it's an italian court after all. But if they start doing the sort of global blocks folks have tried with X, then just withdraw services.

[jonny_eh]

CF's customers may not like that.

[nulld3v]

The problem with this is that it contributes more to internet censorship in that country compared to handling and fighting against each individual censorship request.

[RantyDave]

I'm sure someone in Cloudflare did the math before they went to court and decided their business in Italy was worth saving. If it was, say, the Channel Islands they'd probably just tell them to stuff it.

[jmclnx]

No surprise with this, I wonder how long before this type of blocking is applied to all sites. That is what happens when large sites depend upon large companies like cloudflare.

Already some sites are blocking people that use VPNs, I could also see this expanding as time goes on.

[someothherguyy]

It is commonplace to block a VPN address block if you are experiencing tenacious malicious traffic. Its a consequence of sharing address space with bad actors, not something a service would likely be pursuing without cause.

[dilyevsky]

The insanity of spain’s anti pirate laws continues to elevate every year. It’s puzzling to me what makes it so different even from other European countries

[ignoramous]

> The insanity of spain’s anti pirate laws ...

Unsure about the state of affairs in Iberia, but the TFA is about Italia.

[cutler]

Trouble is this could easily lead to CDN, IP and proxy manipulation by state actors for repressive ends.

[ollybee]

I wonder how it works that they are banned from "routing internet traffic to IP addresses of all services present on the “Piracy Shield”. With a naive approach anyone who controlled the DNS records for a site present on the privacy shield could cause some serious mischief.

[thrw42A8N]

They really should make full use of that rule.

[zb3]

Let's block all Italy and see how fast they backtrack :)

[drdaeman]

Sanctions like this only works if 1) the people (en masse) are not against those bans, but don't feel strongly in favor of them either; and 2) the politicians genuinely represent the will of the people and react to their demands. There could be more conditions that I'm missing here, but I can think only of those two.

If that's correct, it may work. But if that's not the case - it only makes things worse.

[freedomben]

"the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a risky strategy, especially when that friend is the state backed up by massive corporation(s). They don't share your principles, and if you think they'll be satisfied with this and will never go after torrent sites and the like, I think you're sorely mistaken.