cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/56719476
Italy fined Cloudflare 14.2 million euros for refusing to block access to pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, the country’s communications regulatory agency, AGCOM, announced yesterday. Cloudflare said it will fight the penalty and threatened to remove all of its servers from Italian cities.
Amazing this is so downvoted.
It is literally impossible to discuss free speech online, and has been for decades, due to a tsunami of americans thinking their specific law is the only position possible and flooding all debate with smug explanations of how it actually works, actually.
I’m not arguing against free speech here. Granted I also didn’t downvote these comments.
The main problem is that the original comment and subsequent comments don’t explain what the alternative is. It isn’t just the US that has such laws (as I tried to demonstrate by posting an alternative law from the UK.
The thing is, generally the rights of an individual generally stop where the rights of another individual start and vice versa.
The original comment doesn’t even explain what part of either the ruling by the country in question or the threat of legal action on the part of Cloudflare they disagree with, nor did they explain how that is in any way related to free speech.
There exist whole countries that have internet that doesn’t use Cloudflare’s services. Cloudflare is a big player in the DNS space but they aren’t the end all be all of the internet.
If the concern is that Cloudflare’s threat to leave the country will amount to censoring free speech because websites won’t be available due to the lack of Cloudflare services, that’s a problem with the infrastructure of the country in question and their ability to provide DNS blocking as a service (forcing them to rely on a business that is provides said services in exchange for money).
That same money can be used to stand up a Cloudflare alternative.
Reliance on tech corporations is not an excuse to claim free speech is being detrimentally affected by censorship.
Even if it was, the least the original commenter could have done was offered alternative solutions.