Please allow me...
What a jumped up little prick.
He might have a point, but anyone invoking the power of Elon is a cnut.
Cloudflare CEO threatens to make the Winter Olympics a political football after Italy slugs it with a fine
Cloudflare’s CEO has threatened to pull the company out of Italy, and to withdraw free services it intends to provide to the Winter Olympic games, after the nation’s communications regulator slugged it with a fine equal to one percent of its annual revenue for violating anti-piracy regulations. The core of this matter is Italy …
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 14:05 GMT Wzrd1
Re: Please allow me...
Folks, please! Can we really watch our frigging language and shit? There might be some cunt around or worse, someone with a stubbed prick.
As for the OT of the story, I say that the CEO's right, regulatory environments are not suited for his business. Therefore, put a ban for Cloudflare throughout the EU to the appropriate EU regulatory bodies over their feeble attempt at extortion.
See how they enjoy a continent's less traffic and business. Maybe the PRC will hire him. Or perhaps, Trump will invest in him and turn his business into the shitter like most of his have gone.
Oh wait, it's the Olympics, a more corrupt organization one can only find in FIFA...
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Monday 12th January 2026 21:37 GMT Bluck Mutter
this is what is missing from the Holier Tha Thou types...
Context.
Yes a Cunt is a female organ but whenever I have use it (i.e. He's a Cunt) the context of the use was expressing what a wanker/arsehole/prick/piece of shit/fucker etc that the [male] person was. It was not a reference to the female organ. It is just a word that is selected from a list of possible options on the spur of the moment.
Much in the same way that for the decades I wrote Master/Slave processes for Unix/Linux systems I didn't, in said endeavour, invoke the horrors of slavery.
Nor when I worked on the brake Master Cylinder on my car did I, in said endeavour, invoke the horrors of slavery.
Black listing something (say on a network) has no bad connotation unless one is too lazy to determine the historical nature of the work "black list"
You can't abort or kill a process now (despite thankfully the command still being called "kill")
You can't have a "Man-in-the-middle" attack now.
No more Sanity check's or Hung processes or Dummy value.
I could go on....
IT has been plagued with this type of contextless erasure of terms we used freely for decades which didn't have any negative connotation within their context and none of the Black, Asian, physically and visually impaired IT people I worked with ever take offense when these now banned words were used inside of their context.
Bluck
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 13:39 GMT FIA
Re: this is what is missing from the Holier Tha Thou types...
Just be careful you don't end up on the opposite side.
Defending the use of words that some people clearly find offensive, despite your immediate social circle not at all caring more than the effort it would take to simply learn not to use it.
I've met people who will defend their use of 'master/slave' for example, Whereas most people just go 'fair enough..' and get on with their lives. There's the occasional misuse but it quickly becomes second nature. (I find 'master' jarring when I see it as a branch name now).
I don't think it really offended anyone, but I'm not going to argue that to death as there's billions of people on this planet and I can't survey them all, there's much more important things in life.
(We're all still getting used to this global conversation the internet lets us have).
Or to put it another way.... every one of us has something we find offensive that a large group of people won't, if you'd like people to take that into account you have to occasionally give in to the nonsense. (Either that or remove 'nonce' from every cryptographic paper out there).
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 19:14 GMT Bluck Mutter
Re: this is what is missing from the Holier Tha Thou types...
Obviously I don't strike up a conversation with a stranger in a pub and mention I spent my morning working on my network blacklist nor even anyone in my social circle given these person are not techies.
So all those now banned IT words and phrases were used within tech circles. I am retired now so won't have the opportunity to offended some Gen Z'er with said phrases.
Same with nasty swear words. I freely used them around my wife and dog as they are not offended by them and maybe a couple of friends and if outraged I might use them on El Reg as we tend to be mature about this stuff.
I have zero interactions with younger persons so have no idea if the use if such words has reduced or not.
Bluck
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 14:18 GMT Wzrd1
Re: this is what is missing from the Holier Tha Thou types...
@Bluck, indeed! I actually had one organization report me to lawless enforcement over my statement that continued traffic of the sort we were seeing would result in their sites being DNS blackholed and their IP space blacklisted.
Law enforcement found the entire matter hilarious and I proceeded to DNS blackhole their domain and IP blacklist their IP space. They threatened litigation - right until our attorney explained what those terms entailed and our position that hell would have ten kilometers of snow accumulation before we allowed their traffic onto our network again. Suffice it to say, they decided to sod off and kick a rock barefoot down the road and well, six months later after multiple carriers did the same, the entire organization folded up.
Had someone previously object to master/slave on IDE drives, back before cable select was reliable and it went up to corporate imbeciles, so we removed the jumpers and allowed cable select and nothing booted - starting with the CEO and CIO's machines as part of a compliance retrofit. That policy was put paid instantly, the objector called onto the carpet to explain why he sought such disarray throughout the organization. They're not exceptionally bright at times, but when an idiotic policy is issued, occasionally a bit of malicious compliance serves best. Besides, it's nice to be a dick on occasion, "You asked for it, we'll give you precisely what you asked for, not what you wanted, per your direct orders, enjoy".
And when all else fails, one can sweetly offer to remove the offending technology due to the longstanding technical terminology. "Well, you objected to dummy being used, so all dummy stubs were removed and race conditions permitted in the old defective tangle code, just as you directed". Yes, that's actually happened on one gig. Alas, the security robots in the basement were out of commission, so we had to perform a hasty repair to return sanity to that enterprise...
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 19:39 GMT Bluck Mutter
Re: this is what is missing from the Holier Than Thou types...
I do wonder if other engineering occupations have had similar terms banned.
I am sure our IT use of "dummy value" comes from electrical engineering where they use a dummy load when testing.
Babies had dummies when I grew up (hence" he/she spat the dummy") which has it's context within "a substitute for xyz", in this cause being a nipple/tit (ohhh... hope these two words don't offend anyone!!!!)
There must be other words and phrases in these other engineering occupations that I have no knowledge of that would today cause offense to "outsiders".
And just to be clear, I ain't anti-woke (as is in vogue in the US) but I am anti-Karens. As an example of this. my full user name is Bluck Luvs Mutter which is how I imagine a Scots Person would say Black Lives Matter, to my ears.
Bluck
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Wednesday 14th January 2026 16:57 GMT captain veg
Re: Please allow me...
Interestingly the French con has the same root (yet is in no way taboo, e.g. Le Dîner de cons), but is gendered in the intensified forms connard (m) and connasse (f).
-A.
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Monday 12th January 2026 14:31 GMT IceC0ld
Re: Please allow me...
maybe cunt IS the word here, but out THERE, where we tread carefully, cnut is what we use, the use of cunt could well get past the defences of GROK, and even ole Elon Muskolini, creator of the Swastikar might well miss the point of the abuse :o) but they know what we mean when we throw out CNUT
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Monday 12th January 2026 18:21 GMT Tron
Re: Please allow me...
Well it is, but it may also qualify as an 'online harm' for 5 year olds, and see El Reg get a letter from the OSA cabal. Several months later, having failed to fund Labour's next jolly, El Reg vanishes from our browsers at ISP level. Once the government start censoring things, it can become addictive.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 05:41 GMT O'Reg Inalsin
Re: Please allow me...
Cnut (/kəˈnjuːt/ kə-NYOOT;[3] Old Norse: Knútr;[a] c. 990 – 12 November 1035), also known as Canute and with the epithet the Great, was King of England from 1016, King of Denmark from 1018, and King of Norway from 1028 until his death in 1035.The three kingdoms united under Cnut's rule are referred to together as the North Sea Empire by historians.
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Monday 12th January 2026 13:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Please allow me...
Came here to say something very similar. I was prepared to listen to and even cautiously agree in principle with *some* of his points.
But he *very* rapidly lost that when he started praising JD Vance, parroting the Trumpist right-wing propaganda (*) about free speech in Europe being under threat, and then invoked arch-hypocrite Musk- the one-way "free speech absolutist" who bans anyone who upsets him from his platform, amongst everything else.
If his viewpoint deserves any sympathy, he pissed that against the wall when he reminded us why Europe has to stand up to the American right-wing trying to bully it into following *their* values and self-interest, and why it has to move away from the likes of Cloudflare.
(*) And use of language- describing them as "very disturbed" because they won't be bullied into doing what you want is very Trump-like.
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Monday 12th January 2026 18:29 GMT Tron
Re: Please allow me...
I think he is just calling in the cavalry. Whatever you think of Trump, we may need a bit of leverage from the orange tard or European regimes will block most of the internet. They are not popular, but they can pretend to be, if people look on the net and see no criticism or condemnation of them. So the obvious solution to them being corrupt and incompetent is to censor the net.
You would probably not be so antagonistic towards him if they had complied and your innocent website had been wiped off the net, because an Italian censorship organisation didn't understand or care how the net works, and was happy to pander to a bunch of rich media magnates who likely as not, pay less tax than you do.
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Monday 12th January 2026 07:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
the ugly american face of SaaS
Ah yes, taking their bully-boy cue from the commander in chief. and that assclown Elon
We need EU alternatives for everything. Yesterday.
No small thing, but there is huge opportunity here too. There are a lot of companies who would like to be free of USA SaaS hegemony.
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Monday 12th January 2026 12:49 GMT EricM
Re: the ugly american face of SaaS
We need EU alternatives for everything. Yesterday.
Agree. And all American Big Tech be damned, etc.
But just one thought to that:
Should a EU alternative service happily implement the requested over-blocking (IP + DNS resolver) just based on an accusation or suspicion of piracy with a timing requirement of 30 mins but without a 30 mins contest mechanism just on the request of a single sports league (football)- on a worldwide basis?
If yes: When they are done blocking all addresses/ranges, not much of the Internet might be left, with the notable exception of the sites of the big copyright holders...
Even though the form and tone of Cloudflare's complaint is an extremely stupid one:
Piracy is a problem, but overreaching power from private rights holders without meaningful legal oversight and also is a problem.
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Monday 12th January 2026 14:01 GMT kmorwath
Re: the ugly american face of SaaS
Worldwide, no. It's enough they block them from Italy.
Anyway, IP blocking is very effective - ISPs would start soon to keep their network clear of criminals or they will start to lose customers if their IP are blocked or become low reputation.
Do you ever got assigned a bad IP, and had to try to "clean" it?
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 13:25 GMT kmorwath
"Multiple people can sensibly live under 1 IP,"
Not in this case. Try to stream anything outside from your CG-NAT consumer line. It won't work and it can't work because inbound connections can't work.
The issues can be Cloudflare (or cloud providers) proxies, CDNs and the like - but why they are offering services to criminals? Money? And if they become exempt criminals have a nice way to hide their originatin IP behind "bulletproof" proxies.
If Cloudflare aims to become a "bulletproof" host and make money from illegal activities, it can say so...
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Monday 12th January 2026 14:13 GMT Jamie Jones
Re: the ugly american face of SaaS
They need to follow the law in the country they operate in. However bad the law is, they have to follow it.
They can protest, campaign, do whatever they want, but not following the law is in itself a bad precedent. This law may be a bad law, and I'm not saying it isn't, but who are cloudflare to say so? What happens if the next law they refuse to follow is much more reasonable? They aren't the world police. He sounds like he's emboldened by all the Trump rhetoric. What next? If Italy persists, kidnap their president?
The "shadowy elite" / "Europes free speech" / JD Vance bollocks is the icing on the shit sandwich.
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Monday 12th January 2026 22:11 GMT Jamie Jones
Re: the ugly american face of SaaS
Did you miss where I said "They need to follow the law in the country they operate in."?
That's what I was referring to. The article mentions "Piracy Shield" - a system used by *Italian* ISPs. There are a LOT of problems with it, so much so that even the EU is complaining it infringes peoples rights, and they are currently investigating it for violations. https://www.compliancehub.wiki/piracy-shield-is-now-fully-functional-in-italy-controversial-anti-piracy-system-expands-beyond-sports/
Nowhere does it say or imply it applies to any ISP's outside of Italy.
Cloudflare refused to follow Italian law - in Italy.
As I said, the law is controversial, and is being challenged by the EU. That doesn't give a private company the right to ignore the law. They could pull out of Italy if they want, but if they remain, and break the law, they need to accept the consequences, without any sort of hissy rant.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 16:25 GMT sal II
Re: the ugly american face of SaaS
The problem with your statement is that Italy, nor it's courts, yet alone some BS agency has no jurisdiction worldwide - and that's what's what they are asking here - to block IPs and FQDNs worldwide.
This is just another example of a potentially well intended law, written with zero input from technical experts and no meaningful ways to comply with.
30min to enforce !!! based on some football club / media company say-so
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 11:43 GMT The Dogs Meevonks
Re: the ugly american face of SaaS
"Piracy is a problem, but overreaching power from private rights holders without meaningful legal oversight and also is a problem."
I disagree with that.... corporate greed is a problem, piracy is a solution. If things were available and affordable for all, piracy wouldn't be an issue. I grew up copying tapes as a little kid for my C64, floppy disks as a teen in the 90's, then CD's and DVD's. Then the internet really took off and I found I could order 3 or 4 movies from a a Canadian site called DVDsoon and have them delivered to my door for the same price as buying one DVD in the UK... until it's demise. Play.com got a lot of my business too as it was much cheaper than buying in the UK.
I was turned from a pirate into a subscriber with netflix, and then others... I purchased my first copy of windows with W7 Pro after 15yrs of using pirated copies.
Then they started with the enshitification... I started cancelling subscriptions... first getting rid of sky replacing it with a freesat box... then prime... Now the only thing I subscribe to still is netflix... and that's only because my mum came to live with me a few years ago and loves her Korean soaps... Otherwise that would be gone too.
If I want to watch something friends have recommended to me... and it's not on netflix... do I not bother watching it, or do I find an alternative?
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 13:25 GMT kmorwath
Re: the ugly american face of SaaS
Doesn't look to me that people can't live without footbal, F1, basket or concerts.
Fans want their teams spend hundreds of millions for players, but don't want to pay to watch them. Sure, it can work that way.
Is overpriced? Ignore it. If enough people do it, prices will drop. As long as the demand is high - piracy included, they will know they can keep the price high.
"Pirates" are just greed freetards who don't want to pay everything they can get for free without issues.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 19:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: the ugly american face of SaaS
> "Pirates" are just greed freetards who don't want to pay everything they can get for free without issues.
No, some of us are just sick of IP rights holders who appear to want money to just magically show up in their bank account without all that messy dealing in storefronts or content delivery platforms.
I've periodically come across some bit of content I've thought "Hey, that looks like it's worth paying for", and I have been literally UNABLE to find a way to pay the rights holder. So I then have a decision to make - do I give up on something I thought would be interesting (thus deriving both the rights holder of another payment, and myself of some entertainment/learning/whatever), or do I pirate it and at least get my own enjoyment even if the rights holder still hasn't made an actual sale?
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 13:25 GMT kmorwath
Re: the ugly american face of SaaS
We did - Galileo is our GPS platform.... Neflix is a platform with poor shows for young people used to TikTok - and sources a lot of material outside US. I'm watching more French movie than US ones in the past years.... there's no lack of European productions.
Internet ceased to be "american" long ago - it's US companies that need European data now....
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Monday 12th January 2026 10:15 GMT abend0c4
It may be possible.
Depending on the nature of any eventual court process for collection, a judgment might in principle be enforceable elsewhere in the EU or even further afield.
Odd, though, that up to now, at least, Cloudflare were a supporter of an organisation that also has not been above criticism and is also vigorous in its IPR enforcement.
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Monday 12th January 2026 07:38 GMT Pascal Monett
"a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online"
I'm sorry, it seems to be that you're talking about a sovereign country, not a "cabal".
That's the problem with US-based conglomerates. They are so used to paying lobbyists to make sure that "the law" is in their favor that, whenever they meet any kind of legal resistance they cannot control, they go the tried-and-true US-way of invoking conspiracy theories.
You don't like the conditions ? Go ahead and pull out. You'll be leaving the spot to the competition and you know it.
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Monday 12th January 2026 11:17 GMT Martin M
Re: "a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online"
Your “sovereign country” bit is rather undermined by the elected official saying the body was independent and that their decision did not necessarily reflect the policy of the government. “Cabal” might therefore be reasonable, especially if it is overly influenced by the media industry - who have form for lobbying themselves. No idea if that is actually the case.
30 mins is manifestly not enough time to consult with even a very on the ball customer to check whether a mistake has been made. Jumping immediately to the maximum possible fine on the first infraction is also rather unusual behaviour for a regulator. And no appeal process on a fine that size is just silly.
Invoking Elon/Trump annoys me, but doesn’t make his argument invalid.
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Monday 12th January 2026 14:01 GMT kmorwath
Re: "a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online"
If you block the IP two hours after the event it's useless for most sports but some US ones that are designed to make people obese while watching them.
Really? In these times of superpowerful computers and very fast networks 30m are not enough to check if an IP should be blocked or not? The reality is they don't want to pay the right personnel to work on evenings or weekends.
The could use one of those powerful AIs now, of course....
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Monday 12th January 2026 22:27 GMT Not Yb
Re: "a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online"
The maximum fine was actually 2% of global revenue, not the 1% that was actually charged. Cloudflare had quite a while to comply with the law before the fine was issued. I understand the desire for hyperbolic rhetoric, but maybe check the facts next time?
Note: I'm not saying this law is GOOD, but that the failure to follow it did not result in an 'instant maximum fine" after 30 minutes for a first infraction.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 08:21 GMT localzuk
Re: "a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online"
No, it isn't undermined. The body was set up through government to operate as it does. The government was, as far as I'm aware, put there through an act of democracy and the laws that control the agency were created through further acts of democracy.
The fact that the government of the day has a different policy is somewhat irrelevant. If they want the agency to operate differently, they have to use the system of government to change the law. Not simply say it isn't their policy.
Democracies in Europe operate through laws passed in some form of parliament. Not by decree.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 13:30 GMT kmorwath
Re: "a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online"
Iti is the current Meloni government that introduced the "legge n. 93 del 24 luglio 2023" which created the Piracy Shileld. AGCOM commisioner is Capitanio, from the Lega party, part of the majority. Fratelli d'Itala (Meloni's party) and Forza Italia (the Berlusconi party, his family still have huge interests in broadcasting even if they no longer own Milan team...) even proposed changes to block source "predomintaly serving" illegal contents, not "only serving".
So if the current governments says "it's not our policy" they are simply lying. because Meloni is afraid to irritate don Trumpo.
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Monday 12th January 2026 13:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online"
I think the "European media cabal" refers to the rights holders (in this specific case Serie A/B), rather than a sovereign country.
Of course, American rights holders tend to behave in the same way, so a certain amount of hypocrisy involved, but hey - politicians, CEOs, what's new?
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Monday 12th January 2026 08:47 GMT lglethal
Here's the thing. He has a legitimate complaint. Blocking everything like this Regulator has demanded would impact other customers, and that is a problem. Having a completely shite and unreliable appeals process is a legitimate problem. The regulator clearly doesnt have a clue how the tech works, nor has it taken the time to discuss how to do this in the correct way.
HOWEVER, going off on a major rant, sucking up to Trump and Co., esspousing support for Musk's "brand" of free speech bollocks, going on about conspiracy theory level "Evil Media Cabal" stupidity, and threatening to throw his toys out of the pram loses him completely all sympathy. He might have had a legitimate complaint, but quite frankly f%&k him and the horse he rode in on.
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Monday 12th January 2026 14:01 GMT kmorwath
Which "other customers" are impacted? Cloudflare can block the originating IP to keep its proxies clean. Cloud providers as well. But all of them like money from criminal gangs too, they are still profits. Who sell them the servers, the bandwdth, the domain names?
Or this omni-potent companies that sell you tools to monitor your networks down to the single bit, are not capable of identifying illegal activities?
"Pecunia non olet", said a Roman Emperor...
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Monday 12th January 2026 18:02 GMT Phil O'Sophical
Which "other customers" are impacted? Cloudflare can block the originating IP to keep its proxies clean.
As the article points out, in these days of CG NAT one IP address could have hundeds of different, independent, users behind it. Having a regulator throw a tantrum and say "Block address A.B.C.D, and do it right now or else" doesn't give them much time to work out what actual traffic is causing the problem, and develop a more selective block.
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Monday 12th January 2026 21:24 GMT kmorwath
CG-NAT is used for consumers premises, not for commercial services. Even lowlly VPS get their own IP address, since you can't run most usual services behind a CG-NAT.
The issue coulld be proxies like those implemented by Cloudflare (used to shield to original IP from authorities also...) and cloud load-balancers where the cloud connects to the internet. But they know which is the IP behind them feeding the illegal traffic. But they don't want to lose the money they make, nor spend some to identify and block them.
Some IP hosting several small sites can be used to publish and advertise the illegal streams, but they are not used for the streaming itself, they don't have the resources.
All these complains are just fingers to hide the ugly truth - many companies like to make money also from illegal business - they know it but pretend it doesn't happen - just look at Facebook.... but it's not alone.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 13:30 GMT kmorwath
Websites - not streaming services. You can't stream to thousands of users from that systems. You can host websites that direct users to the actual streaming IPs, that's why blocking FQDNs is necessary too. Try to have a couple of thousand of streams from your dev machine. without being able to install software but costomize Wordpress a litttle, and tell me how well it woks...
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 00:43 GMT that one in the corner
> I don't watch football, but do have 1.1.1.1 as a secondary DNS (primary is a PiHole)
Uh, what is your PiHole using as its upstream? Unless you have been *very* busy filling in name tables, your PiHole is only taking its upstream, removing entries as per your chosen filters, and presenting that as your "primary" DNS (for anything outside your LAN). Let me guess: the PiHole uses 1.1.1.1? So basically, you are using 1.1.1.1 throughout?
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 22:46 GMT that one in the corner
Jolly good. Yes, you certainly can add unbound to your PiHole, *but* that is an additional step that you have to do and, although most readers here are more than capable of doing so, I'd very much expect that, when asked what their DNS was set to, they'd always say that they had unbound (or similar) running.
A response of just "PiHole" with no indication of having installed the additional package - I'm more than happy to take "you are still using an upstream DNS" as the base assumption.
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Monday 12th January 2026 09:18 GMT that one in the corner
Pro bono? Bone headed!
> 1. Discontinuing the millions of dollars in pro bono cyber security services we are providing the upcoming Milano-Cortina Olympics
Has he talked to his finance and marketing people about that threat?
He is talking about throwing away the massive amounts of advertising they'd get from sponsoring the Olympics* - and you can bet your life the "millions of dollars" is taken from the standard customer invoice numbers and not the actual spend by CloudFlare.
And, of course, this is his Point Number One, because it is the one he can politicise the most.
As above, yes, there sre genuine technical problems being faced, but this is him spitting out his dummy and crying.
* Notice how he carefully doesn't say "sponsoring", which might make everyone realise that viewers would be seeing the name plastered everywhere, but instead uses "pro bono". Which makes it sound awfully nice, "we're not getting anything back" or even, given where that phrase is more often used, "we are only doing this because it is the Right Thing to do, it would injust not to".
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Monday 12th January 2026 12:11 GMT Tom 38
Re: Pro bono? Bone headed!
I would have thought Legal would be first point of call; even if they are providing the services free of charge, the olympic organizing committee would have surely had some form of contract. I would doubt that contract has a break clause on getting fined for breaking the law.
Notice how he carefully doesn't say "sponsoring", which might make everyone realise that viewers would be seeing the name plastered everywhere, but instead uses "pro bono".
I was also going to rail against that - pro bono publica = for the public good. This is not pro bono - the olympics are paying, they're paying publicity instead of cash
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Monday 12th January 2026 10:00 GMT the hawk
Fair point, badly made
As a man who was away from home at the weekend, and just wanted to watch a football match that I’d paid for in my subscription (with an online viewer component) already… It’s clear sports broadcasters are drunk with power, and it’s dangerous having governments creating national laws with international overreach to kowtow to their every paranoid and avaricious whim.
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Monday 12th January 2026 10:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Fair point, badly made
In Italy football (or soccer, if you like) has more power than the government. This shitshow of "piracy shield" is a weapon of unrestricted automated online censure created by a private entity (Lega Calcio) and paid by public money.
I'm Italian and I'm really happy to see internet firms oppose it and make fun of our government that is slave to Lega Calcio.
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Monday 12th January 2026 12:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Fair point, badly made
According to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_owners_of_Italian_football_clubs
only 9 out of the 20 Serie A teams are majority Italian-owned (10 if you count Fiorentina, whose owner is an Italian-born American citizen). 8 (or 7) have an American owner, with 1 Canadian, one Indonesian, and 1 Romanian.
If the fight is Italian football vs. Cloudfare, it's just as much a pissing contest between American companies as it is Italy vs. USA.
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Monday 12th January 2026 13:16 GMT that one in the corner
Re: Fair point, badly made
> 10 if you count Fiorentina, whose owner is an Italian-born American citizen
An American citizen who is the CEO and sole owner of Mediacom, "the fifth largest cable television company in the US"[1], so I'm willing to bet that he is going to be in the American side ("We must protect our rights to monetise") unless there is some reason to show old-fashioned Italian patriotism (um, "we must protect our rights to monetise^^^^^^^^fund your local club" but spoken in Italian to the footie fans)
[1] source: Wikipedia; I know, I know
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Monday 12th January 2026 16:17 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Fair point, badly made
It’s clear sports broadcasters are drunk with power, and it’s dangerous having governments creating national laws with international overreach to kowtow to their every paranoid and avaricious whim.
I think it's a combination of sports broadcasters, and more importantly the FIGC and Italy's mega clubs. Plus soccer being a hugely popular and influential sport in Italy, where their manly men love watching 22 fit young blokes chasing a ball around a field. So Juventus ends up with around $500m a year and can spaff millions on players. Or not, if people bootleg streams without paying for the rights, and make the Agnellis sad.
And given ball chasing is worth billions, their lawyers are more agressive than Juventus or Milan's defenders. And given Cloudflare is also worth billions, the litigation will fly faster than a speeding striker. But Cloudflare also probably doesn't have much of a leg to stand on. Because people connect to Cloudflare to watch unlicenced streams, they're effectively distributing content illegally. Which given Italian-Americans, probably also upsets some broadcaster in the US who's spaffed millions on the rights to broadcast or distribute Italian soccer in the US, so they might join in with kicking Cloudflare in the balls.
And I've also seen letters from soccer lawyers putting ISPs & telcos on notice not to participate in illegal streaming. Which sometimes got FUN! writing back to ask for a list of who has the rights in each territory so we could make sure we're only providing services to those entities. You kind of develop a sense for spotting dodgy rebroadcasting services, but took a suprising amount of pressure to get the list divulged. It also gets complicated when national rights holders also have some obligations to prevent theft and rebroadcasting, eg Sky is pretty agressive catching and prosecuting pubs & clubs that didn't pay for their stuff, or rebroadcast outside the UK, eg Premier league stuff to bars in Spain. US sports bodies & rights holders do the same because $$$ in flogging those rights or PPV events.
So I don't entirely agree with Cloudflare's special pleading. They're illegally distributing content and about the only bit I agree with is it's probably costing them a lot of money and they're not getting paid.
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Monday 12th January 2026 10:45 GMT kmorwath
Cloudflare hypocrisy
They do make money from pirated contents. Criminals often pay for some services they need. That's one reason it's so hard to block online crime. And that's anyway part of their plan to become the internet gatekeeper.
Shared IPs? Residential customers may be behind CG-NAT. People serving pirated contents, and making money from IT, don't use shared IPs. They use some hosting that provide them the resources to access and deliver copyright contents with the speed required to serve enough users to make money. These are not botnets used fos DDoS, or someone sharing torrents.
That's true for FQDNs as well - criminals don't point their DNS at some company IPs. The issue for hosting service providing resources to criminals (BTW, many of them in The Netherlands....) is those IPs quickly get a bad reputations, and thereby become of little value, since they cannot easily resell them to other customers when the criminals have to move to other ones once blocked. And of course they can't deliver them over IPv6....
Due process? The problem is the pirated sources must be blocked quickly. If you block the IP a couple of months after the event is streamed, it's pretty useless. It's useless to complain the legilstation is not updated to the actual times, and when it is, then complain it dents into your profit.
Cloudflare has no obligation to block IPs or FQDNs "worldwide". Blocking access from Italy is enough (unlike, for example, the CLOUD Act....) - the fact that the block can be cicumvented using VPNs is well known. But Cloudflare deosn't want to do that too. And adopts the blackmail approach so common from internet companies. But who wants a company that aims to take control of all, or most, internet traffic? Moreover if Italian ISPs have to abide, and Cloudflare is exempted - it would be an unfair adavantage.
Just I wish the same approach would be used with spammers and other kind of Internet crime - not just to save the profits of those kicking a ball.
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Monday 12th January 2026 13:52 GMT tip pc
Re: Cloudflare hypocrisy
Shared IPs? Residential customers may be behind CG-NAT. People serving pirated contents, and making money from IT, don't use shared IPs. They use some hosting that provide them the resources to access and deliver copyright contents with the speed required to serve enough users to make money. These are not botnets used fos DDoS, or someone sharing torrents.
an IP can host an unlimited number of FQDN's.
the shared IP's is in relation to the fact that a hosting provider can host a number of different domains behind a single public IP.
If the regulator approves the requests, it uses an automated system to inform ISPs and other players that they must block access to certain IP addresses and not provide DNS services to domains suspected of facilitating piracy.
miscreant sets themselves up at a hosting provider that then uses a single public IP for hundreds of domains. Suddenly cloudflare drop resolving the IP & all those other sites can't be reached.
sounds like they are being mandated to do it globally too so those outside of Italy lose access too. Stops Italians using a vpn to bypass the block.
a better way would be to drop resolving for the individual domain from clients originating in Italy rather than everything on an IP globally, won't stop VPN usage to sidestep the block.
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Monday 12th January 2026 21:25 GMT kmorwath
"an IP can host an unlimited number of FQDN's."
Sure, and you can stream to thousands of users from it? You may advertise illegal contents from there, not stream.
And again that's ISPs greed, they sell cheap hosting and then put thousands of people on the same host, then sell domains without the simplest check, profiterring from illegal businesses.
Next time your systems are flooded by spam, phishing and ransomware, say thank you to these people....
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 20:02 GMT tip pc
Re: "an IP can host an unlimited number of FQDN's."
I appreciate not every reading the reg is technical, a bit of googling goes a long way to understanding
As a primer have a read of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
Server Name Indication (SNI) is an extension to the Transport Layer Security (TLS) computer networking protocol by which a client indicates which hostname it is attempting to connect to at the start of the handshaking process.[1] The extension allows a server to present one of multiple possible certificates on the same IP address and TCP port number and hence allows multiple secure (HTTPS) websites (or any other service over TLS) to be served by the same IP address without requiring all those sites to use the same certificate. It is the conceptual equivalent to HTTP/1.1 name-based virtual hosting, but for HTTPS. This also allows a proxy to forward client traffic to the right server during a TLS handshake. The desired hostname is not encrypted in the original SNI extension, so an eavesdropper can see which site is being requested. The SNI extension was specified in 2003 in RFC 3546
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Monday 12th January 2026 13:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Let me introduce you to this little thing we call "sarcasm", I understand it is quite popular in some parts of the world.
Ok, ok, so The Register has gone all yank in recent years (so cut out sarcasm and for pity's sake don't try any irony!), but there is still a rebellious streak in some of the reporters.
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Monday 12th January 2026 11:16 GMT Headley_Grange
Multiple FQDN
When I first set up in business for myself about 20 years ago I knew virtually nothing about the web. I looked for a web domain for my company and the .com and .co.uk were all taken but there was a .uk.com one and was happy with this. I didn't know that this was a sub-domain of .uk.com until a few years later when it was blocked by one of the spam filter services, presumably because one of the other .uk.com sites was spamming. I was offline for a few days while the host sorted it out. When the .uk domain came up I jumped onto that, which brought its own problems, but that's another story.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 09:54 GMT kmorwath
Re: Multiple FQDN
Any "domain" is a subdomain of a top level domain. The problem is who is the legal owner of the subdomain. Nobody would block the whole .co.uk subdomain, because the domains under it are owned by different entities and properly assigned. If you bought a subdomain by a a fraudster "selling" subdomains under uk.com without being a registrar and without the proper process and procedures to assign you the ownership of the domain, well, you were deceived, and you can't blame the system for the consequences.
And if people used that fraud system for illegal activities like spamming it was perferctly fine to block the whole subdomain.
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Monday 12th January 2026 12:42 GMT Lon24
Confused (again)
What was the regulator actually asking?
If it was to block 1.1.1.1 resolving naughty.site to accesses from Italy - then that should be feasible while allowing other sites to resolve to the same IP - though 30 minutes would be challenging. If it's delivering the site through its CMS service - this shouldn't be difficult either. It shouldn't impact anybody else (or folks using a VPN). And presumably more people use 8.8.8.8 so did Google comply or whether they were not ordered?
Unless the regulator actually specified the IP and not naughty.site. That's downright technically stupid. That's what needs to be sorted. Resorting to the 'censorship/Trump' playbook instead of engaging constructively is going to hurt everybody, Cloudflare's reputation and Italy's sovereignty. Unless the Italian premiere is planning to use her mate Trump to leverage control of her own regulator.
Too much going on here.
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Monday 12th January 2026 13:46 GMT tip pc
Re: Confused (again)
If the regulator approves the requests, it uses an automated system to inform ISPs and other players that they must block access to certain IP addresses and not provide DNS services to domains suspected of facilitating piracy.
a single IP can host an unlimited number of FQDN's.
miscreant sets themselves up at a hosting provider that then uses a single public IP for hundreds of domains. Suddenly cloudflare drop resolving the IP & all those other sites can't be reached.
sounds like they are being mandated to do it globally too so those outside of Italy lose access too.
a better way would be to drop resolving for the individual domain from clients originating in Italy rather than everything on an IP globally.
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Monday 12th January 2026 17:01 GMT Alan Mackenzie
Re: Confused (again)
> a better way would be to drop resolving for the individual domain from clients originating in Italy rather than everything on an IP globally.
No, that misses the point. The content that is to be blocked belongs to Italian copyright holders and is Italian. Therefore the Italian regulators must be deemed to have worldwide jurisdiction over it.
What's the point of just blocking these copyright violating sites from Italians, when the rest of the world just pirates everything? Not a lot, really. These sites need to be neutralised everywhere.
I'd be prepared to wager that this fine didn't just come out of the blue. Cloudfare would have, at first, been asked politely to come up with a technical solution, and only on them refusing to do so would this IP address blocking have been required. I'd say their 14 million Euro fine is perfectly justified. Likely this fine will be followed up with litigation for damages from the copyright holders, and Cloudfare won't have a leg to stand on. The magnitude of those damages will likely exceed that of the fine.
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Monday 12th January 2026 22:40 GMT Not Yb
Re: Confused (again)
The official announcement of the fine (in Italian, of course):
https://www.agcom.it/comunicazione/comunicati-stampa/comunicato-stampa-71
If I'm understanding it correctly, Cloudflare was essentially told "implement blocking on DNS resolver 1.1.1.1 that matches Italian legal requirements", and refused to do so for long enough that the regulator went ahead with imposing a fine.
Cloudflare's used to working in the US legal system, where free speech is still (mostly) king when it comes to ISPs, but other countries have significantly different ideas about whether helping publish illegal (in that country) kinds of speech should be completely free from consequence.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 09:55 GMT kmorwath
Re: Confused (again)
This is not a "free speech" matter. This is a commercial copyright matter. You can't sell contents you don't own. ISPs in US are protected by Section 230 - which is still not a "free for all" law. Other laws (i.e. DMCA...) exempt ISPs and content provieder as long as they are unaware illegal contents are delivered by their systems - once they know, they have to act to remove them. In EU similar laws exist as well.
Anyway, I would like to know how many FISA warrantless queries Cloudflare happily served....
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 09:55 GMT kmorwath
Re: Confused (again)
Try to stream to thousands of users from that system - systems you can't install any software onto. C'mon. if you were able to change the DNS on your ISP router that doesn't make you a network engineer. The FQDNs advertised there are those who point to the actual IPs streaming the contents, from difefrent systems with the resources to do it. They need to capture and decode the original stream (there are different ways to achieve it) and the re-encode and re-distribute it. It's not done on some Godaddy shared hosting.
That's why both FQDNs and IPs need to be blocked. The domains pointing at the streaming sources needs to be blocked, and then the streaming sources. That allows for avoiding blocking shared IPs that actually don't stream anything.
But companies like Cloudflare do sell proxy systems - which are also a nice way to hide the originating IP and try to avoid blocks because if you block the Cloudllare proxy you do block a lot of legal traffic too.
Cloudlflare sees a businness opportunity here. If Italian ISPs are forced to block the traffic, but Clouddlare is exempted and its proxies cannot be blocked for the reason above - and hide the original IP, criminals will happily buy Cloudflare services so they can't be blocked and identified. Win-Win!
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Monday 12th January 2026 18:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Confused (again)
They are actually asking for 1.1.1.1 to __NOT__ respond to ANY queries that resolve to a specific IP address.
No, they are not asking them to block specific domains/hostnames -- those are irrelevant in the end, as any "Pirate IPTV" service can change the domain names in a few minutes, and then randomize the hostname continuously.
Italy's "Privacy Shield" works based on IP addresses. For the purpose of blocking access to "Pirate IPTV" streams, that's all they care about.
The worst problem is that they do not really need any "proof" that a suspect IP address is "broadcasting" copyrighted content. They just ask for the blocking, and they expect it to happen. If your service/website/app is caught in the crossfire - well, that's sad for you. Good luck with the appeal.
And before you ask -- the bulk of their issue is not with random websites that broadcast copyrighted content, yes that would be annoying to change the domain continuously for the end users, but rather for IPTV Services that have a more complex infrastructure (aka: Load Balancers).
So, what "Privacy Shield" wants to do is ask Cloudflare for their 1.1.1.1 service (public DNS Resolver) to stop resolving *anything* that leads to those IP addresses they identify as providing IPTV Services.
This has nothing to do with their Proxy/CDN services, mind you. Pirate IPTV providers do not (usually) use those services to cover up their "Load Balancers" (aka: the actual servers/IPs that deliver the video streams), because that infringes on the Cloudflare ToS and they are __very__ quick to disable those (because it's a huge bandwidth hog).
Source: I sometimes provide technical support to "Pirate IPTV" services, allegedly.
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Monday 12th January 2026 21:25 GMT kmorwath
Re: Confused (again)
Criminals to pay for services. They don't steal domains, they buy them, and many of them, making registrars happier,,, how could they sell "qweuhui1he1923h19.com" otherwise? Think about those letters combinations you can't sell otherwise!!! Criminal are a huge asset, they increase profits a lot!
And they also buy proxies and balancers to hide their real origin and make harder to stop them. Incidentally, companies like Cloudflare make money from that....
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Monday 12th January 2026 23:16 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Confused (again)
This raises an ineresting question. Say address w.x.y.z hosts a lot of legitimate customers' domains and one pirate site. An Italian media company instructs Cloudflare to stop resolving anything to w.x.y.z causing a drop in traffic to the legitimate sites. Who, then, is liable for the losses of those sites? A few lawsuits against the Italian media company might result in a search for a tchnically sensible solution.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 09:57 GMT kmorwath
Re: Confused (again)
They don't ask to block any resolivng to a specific IP. They ask to block FQNDs and the IPs separately. On a shared hosting system using host headers and SNI to route traffic to the virtual host is sufficent, since you can't access them directly by IP.
But streaming sources don't use shared hosting - which can't be configured as such, and don't have the resources - while criminals do use multiple domains that point to a single IP (or a set of IPs) distributed around ti make more difficult to take all of them down.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 20:17 GMT tip pc
Re: Confused (again)
Define shared hosting system.
AWS is home to a number of successful online streamers
Have you heard of Netflix
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix-case-study/
Or peacock
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/peacock-case-study/
Being generous I’d say you’ve misunderstood how websites & connectivity works.
Some google searches can surface some additional detail on how it all works
And yes a single ip can host an unlimited number of sites and each of those sites can also stream content over that single ip,
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Monday 12th January 2026 21:29 GMT that one in the corner
Re: This
Where would the USA be if the Great European Powers hadn't set out to conquer the New World?
Where would it be if there hadn't been Greatness across Europe as a whole, not just a single Great country in (or in close proximity to) Europe? If there had been only one then there would not have been any fighting between them and wouldn't have ended up with a heap of separate S's to U, after a bunch of Euros went over to win some little kerfuffle in, what was it, 1775 to 178-something? Hard to remember; being a Brit, our attention was on more interesting matters elsewhere.
You may not have noticed it, but the US population is still European-ish (at least, the self-proclaimed "majority" of it that claim to be "Real Americans" seem to enjoy boasting about that, if the shouty YouTube videos they keep posting are any guide to their actual beliefs).
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 08:00 GMT Mike VandeVelde
Re: This
Where would the USA be if the smallpox holocaust hadn't preceded them? Answer: no further into North America than the Vikings 500+ years earlier.
Where would the USA be without importing millions of African slaves? Answer: centuries behind where they are now.
Where would the USA be without profiteering off of both world wars? Answer: not a "superpower".
Where would the USA be without imported Nazi scientists and engineers? Answer: not victorious in the Cold War.
Where would the USA be without brutal domination of Central and South America for the last 100 years? Answer: without a lot of it's biggest historical corporations.
Where would the USA be without using all of that power to bully the world into accepting copyright and trademark and patent serfdom? Answer: much less globally consequential.
Where will the USA be after 2 terms of Donald Trump (and likely for decades after)? Answer: a lot closer to where they rightfully ought to be. A moderate power at best. Likely a fossil fuel burning technological backwater with no foreign born brains to exploit. At worst maybe multiple civil war splinter states with feudal warlords and highly variable borders.
We can only hope the best for them (nobody can tell them anything), and pray that whatever convulsions they go through on their way down don't damage the rest of the world too badly.
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Monday 12th January 2026 15:23 GMT A dirigible
Re: This
If Mr Prince were willing to do that, he would just do it¹. At the moment, this is just posturing and crying for daddy. This looks aimed 100 % at an USA audience (schmoozing to their bigwigs; mentioning an »European cabal«, as opposed to a good-ol’-American cabal) — so maybe at you?
¹ his problem: Italians are more often than not the product rather than customers.
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Monday 12th January 2026 17:10 GMT Mockup1974
As usual, some unelected agencies in Europe wants to censor the Internet. While I really don't like Cloudflare (they make it very painful to use a VPN, for example), they are completely in the right here. And their CEO's hotheadedness just makes it so the message is heard.
At the current trajectory, the EU and UK will be just as bad as Russia in 10 years.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 09:56 GMT kmorwath
Illegal streaming of contet you don't own is not "free speech" - is teft. US companies do protect their copyright as well. Can I stream NBA/NFL/MBL/NHL events freely without issues?
While writing "Trump is a dangerous idiot and will turn US into an authoritarian state" is free speech - but now will allow Trump, Vance and Rubio deny you a visa to enter US. Like they did with Breton because it has a different opinion about rules.
Who is the censor?
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Monday 12th January 2026 18:25 GMT James O'Shea
seems straightforward to me
1. the fine is more than double the revenue CloudFlare makes from Italy. "The regulator therefore decided to fine Cloudflare one percent of its annual revenue, a little more than €14 million, which is more than double the company’s revenue derived from Italy."
2. it would be... interesting to attempt to comply, given the way that CGNAT works.
3. there is no easy method of appealing the fine.
Cool. Pull the plug, remove all CloudFlare services from Italy, tell them to stuff their fine.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 09:56 GMT kmorwath
Re: seems straightforward to me
CG-NAT is used for residential customers only. Illegal streams are not delivered from consumer broadband routers.
Again, this is not about freetards torrenting - this is about criminal organization able to serve thousands of users.
But I'm sure the same freetards are those using illegal streams for sport events, and don't want to lose them.
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Monday 12th January 2026 22:30 GMT DS999
I would have supported his actions
Until he threatened to pull support for the Winter Olympics when they are only a few weeks away. That is a giant ASSHOLE move on his part, and my sympathy for him ends right there even though I agree 100% that one country's laws should not be able to determine what DNS results (or search results or whatever) that the entire world sees. Does anyone want Taliban level filtering, combined with Xi's filters to expunge Pooh Bear from the internet, Trump's filters to expunge any mention of him in relation to Epstein from the internet, and so forth? Because that's where we'd end up if we gave an inch on this sort of thing.
Maybe in the future organizations getting "free" services should insist on a contract where they pay $1, and define damages of however much is required to replace those discounted services should they pull out within a certain timeframe. If CEOs are going to try to use free services as political leverage, they are no longer free and should not be treated as such by the recipient. A company making a legit offering they have no intention of going back on would have no issues signing such a contract. If they refused it means you dodged a bullet because they planned on having strings attached, or at least wanted to maintain that option.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 09:15 GMT rg287
Re: I would have supported his actions
Maybe in the future organizations getting "free" services should insist on a contract where they pay $1, and define damages of however much is required to replace those discounted services should they pull out within a certain timeframe. If CEOs are going to try to use free services as political leverage, they are no longer free and should not be treated as such by the recipient. A company making a legit offering they have no intention of going back on would have no issues signing such a contract. If they refused it means you dodged a bullet because they planned on having strings attached, or at least wanted to maintain that option.
Being a supplier or sponsor of the Olympics isn't a matter of calling the IOC, asking if they'd like some free service and sending over some credentials. There will be a contract, whhich will specify all sorts of things - like what the supplier is expected to supply, the supplier's rights to declare themselves as a supplier and use Olympic iconography, etc, etc. There are probably no monetary damages since there's no monetary outlay (except maybe some liability in cases of gross negligence) but there will definitely be a contract in place. Prince is just working on the assumption that any penalties for breaking the contract are worth less than €14m, or less than the bad press.
It also depends whether the contract is more broadly with the IOC, covering multiple Games (who could pursue CF for damages at the very least in Switzerland, but probably also in the US) or specifically with the MC26 organising committee for these Games, who are a solely Italian organisation and would have limited recourse if CF shuttered their Italian subsidiary. Could be both - an IOC sponsor agreement in general coveing multiple Games, with a specific service contract with the Organising Committee for these Games.
For everyone else, now would be the time to think about alternatives. Not just specifically because of this, but the direction of the US hegemony in general and whether your data is safe in M365/GWorkspace, etc, etc.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 02:39 GMT streaky
Invoking "an independent regulator"
.. is the most cowardly, evil, lie in modern politics.
Firstly, they're absolutely never independent.
Secondly, they're usually captured by activists.
Thirdly, government usually retains control over them.
This argument fails on all three - just like it fails on all three with Ofcom in the UK.
I would start with number 4 on his list, right now, today. No jobs or investment for Italy, that's an easy one. I'd probably follow quickly migrating hardware out of Italy too, they've demonstrated themselves as too dangerous to be allowed near your infra. Then escalate from there.
If Trump doesn't also see the necessity of sanctions with US tech under attack for not being pure evil then IDK what we do - remove the ability of governments to see or oversight the internet entirely? It can be done.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 09:56 GMT kmorwath
Re: Invoking "an independent regulator"
Italian companies will fill the void left by Cloudflare, which aims to be the internet monopolist. Look at what happened when Cloudflare had issues, too many destinations no longer reachable. Cloiaudflare is a dangerous SPoF - and worse.
If you really want a "free" internet, companies like Cloudflare can't become the gatekeeper - and without accountability.
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Tuesday 13th January 2026 19:39 GMT kmorwath
Akamai CEO take on internet piracy....
.... and he's not supporting Cloudflare stance.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/safeguarding-digital-frontier-why-global-anti-piracy-efforts-tom-lldle/
"Unfortunately, piracy is a lucrative business, one that creates strong financial incentives for some technology companies to look the other way or hesitate to take it down. Companies that have lax attitudes about piracy on their networks brazenly hide behind so-called commitments to “free speech.” But there is nothing free about piracy. Piracy is theft, pure and simple."
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Wednesday 14th January 2026 04:14 GMT Mike VandeVelde
Re: Akamai CEO take on internet piracy....
To call copyright violations "piracy" is hyperbole. Piracy implies taking something away from someone. Making a digital copy of something doesn't take anything away from anybody, except *potential* profits. Saying that every single copyright violation would have been copyright holder income otherwise is ludicrous. If you couldn't get it for free you would pay - but would you?? Maybe we could argue about what fraction would, but only an idiot would argue it would be 100%. People could live without watching football live, maybe sadder lives but easily survivable. RIAA/MPAA/etc putting laughably exaggerated dollar values on unauthorized digital copies of digital files is obscene.
If you want to make money playing football then sell tickets. If every single ticket holder live streams the game with their cell phone camera then fuck you. If you want to put together some kind of fancy official live stream of the game then fill your boots, lots of people would obviously pay for that as opposed to a jittery nosebleed view filled with crowd chatter. But whatever Cloudflare or anybody else might do to "secure" your "rights" to your official stream, if every paying viewer live streams their screen with their cell phone camera over wireless mesh networks then fuck you. Like where does that end, signal triangulation trucks with encryption cracking gear roaming every city with copyright police stormtroopers kicking doors in? Copyright holders should make whatever paltry few billions they can and be quietly delighted with it. As a taxpayer I say nope nopitty nope to any kind of public funding for helping them make even more money.
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Wednesday 14th January 2026 11:06 GMT kmorwath
Re: Akamai CEO take on internet piracy....
It takes away some profits - that's why copyright exists. Sure, not all those who get illegal contents would pay for the legal ones, but some would do, and anyway, they are paying for illegal contents. And if illegal streaming was allowed, why people should pay for the legal ones - and what would happen to profits? I make a living writing software, if anybody could copy it without issues, I would have to find a different job - and many others here.
Again, this is not against people making torrents available for free (although they still take away profits...) but against criminal organizations that make money from illegal streams. And this is theft.
These are people who are able to copy and stream live events in real time. Again, it's not some idiot streaming from his phone instead of actually watching the match. And because that's their venues and their events, they can tell you also "fuck you" if you don't want to abide to the rules. Do you allow anybody in your house stream you as they like?
If your happines depends of watching a football match (or any other sport), you should look for help, and reconsider your life priorities.But fans want teams pay players and coaches hundeed of millions, want mega-stadiums, 4K streams from tens of cameras, follow sport gossip on social media... and pay nothing for it. You can still watch the equivalent of FOSS sports, they do exist, there are not only commercial/professional sports with requires billion to run. Those money needs to come from somewhere. Do I approve them? No. But the solution would be to ignore them. As long as too many people godfies them they know they can exploit them. And piracy is not the solution, they know you can't live without.
I agree with you that citizens' taxes should not be used to subsidize professional sports (but "panem et circenses" is an old rule to keep the plebs quiet...), stil crime is crime and you can't say "stealing from the rich should be legal" and authorities should do nothing.
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Friday 16th January 2026 10:41 GMT fred_flinstone
Xeet or Xit? The important question!
This does appear to be a case of clueless politicians/lawmakers (who likely get free premium tickets for the football series...) just blindly listening to their (ahem) bosses. (This is Italy after all, who gave the world the Mafia).
Should content creators be able to protect their property? Yes. Should they be able to do this easily on a global basis? Also, yes. (Take that, Emperor T!). BUT it needs to be handled in a far better way than this Italian spaghetti, and the fines are far too big a slice of the pizza.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
