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Comment by ellen364 | Hacker News Reader

> It's not about Cloudflare, it's about the millions of people in Spain who couldn't access a plethora of legitimate, unrelated websites and services because of the block.

I happen to agree that La Liga wildly overreaching is on brand. But I think this is partly about Cloudflare.

What's happening is a reminder of how centralised the internet is becoming. If blocking Cloudflare IPs brings down big chunks of the internet for Spain, that's a problem. Cloudflare could go down for a while, or collapse permanently, or get compromised.

Putting aside my opinions on La Liga overreach, it will also be a problem if companies get to say to courts "Oh, well, if you block those IPs the internet goes down for your country, so let us know what you want to block and maybe we'll get around to it."

Cloudflare might get a resolution from the court that suits them in the short-term. But drawing this to government attention might not suit them in the long run.

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> Putting aside my opinions on La Liga overreach, it will also be a problem if companies get to say to courts "Oh, well, if you block those IPs the internet goes down for your country, so let us know what you want to block and maybe we'll get around to it."

On the contrary, it would be an excellent outcome if the Internet became all-or-nothing, and countries could either choose to provide Internet access or block the entire Internet, with zero ability to selectively block things they don't like.

Doing that via a few centralized CDNs would be bad. Doing that at the protocol level would be excellent.

So... you don't agree with the existence of laws? And differing jurisdictions?

I would like it to be impossible to selectively block portions of the Internet. I would like it to not be an option available to anyone.

...is what most free speech proponents say until they discover child pornography, and then say "well, impossible for anything except child pornography", and then they discover...

That is not a problem to solve by internet blocking. That's a problem to be solved by tracking down the sources and arresting them so they can't make more. Blocking doesn't stop the underlying abuse. And blocking is too dangerous of a capability to exist, because it can and will be abused.

Nah, it should be solved by your phone automatically reporting you to the police if it thinks you have CSAM stored /s (I fully agree with you)

Why are you concerned about the dangers of internet blocking but not of physical imprisonment? Arrest is also a dangerous capability because you can arrest your opponents and use the fear that creates to control people. Abuse of arrests is substantially worse because being arrested means that you lose both your physical and digital freedom, whereas being blocked only restricts your digital freedom. Many people think that such a capability as a response to online acts should not exist which is why Tor exists despite over half of traffic on the Tor network being related to CP.

All things should exist in reasonable degrees. Arrests and blocks are legitimate tools that should be used to keep people safe, but their use should be accountable and subject to due criticism. You can't weasel out of absolutism by overloading alternative solutions unless you also explain why such tools are meaningfully different.

One of my controversial opinions is that I think the Tor network strikes a good balance. Occasional vulnerabilities and raids keep those perpetuating the most severe long-term abuse on their toes, while the scarcity of such exploits facilitates the short-term censorship resistance necessary to serve as a backup for censored communications during political turbulence.

Arrest can only happen when someone is subject to a jurisdiction (or somewhere with an extradition treaty), which is an added layer of protection. And it's a heavier tool, which means it gets used in fewer and more serious cases.

Blocking can shape a whole society.

Also, arrest is the appropriate tool to stop something bad from happening, rather than just hiding it.

(And to be clear, this is all about things that a government is restricting, which should be few and far between. Private sites can block whatever users they wish.)

Exactly, which mitigates abuse only to the same degree that it mitigates your own response to the solution to child pornography. Either the necessary custody chains needed to enforce laws overseas exist or they don't, you can't have it both ways.

It is a heavier tool, but it's also a more severe tool, I'm not sure I understand this objection.

Blocks and arrests both serve to reduce the occurrence of bad things because bad things require delivery and arrests take time and are sometimes not possible. Disbanding the drug cartels in Brazil and Mexico would be the best solution to the flow of drugs into the U.S, but that's hard and even at best will take a long time, so in the meantime countries settle for trying to stop drugs at the border instead. The response to overseas distribution of child pornography should be similar.

My objection is precisely that the important thing is to stop abuse, and that blocking just hides something rather than tracking down and stopping the abuse.

(To be clear, I do also think it's important to go track down the sites hosting such content and take down the sites. But at the source, not blocking at the border, which is a capability that shouldn't exist.)

Also, at the risk of unrelated political commentary:

> Disbanding the drug cartels in Brazil and Mexico would be the best solution to the flow of drugs into the U.S,

Legalization would be the best solution to the association between drugs and organized crime.

> My objection is precisely that the important thing is to stop abuse, and that blocking just hides something rather than tracking down and stopping the abuse. (To be clear, I do also think it's important to go track down the sites hosting such content and take down the sites. But at the source, not blocking at the border, which is a capability that shouldn't exist.)

I don't think you've justified that objection any other way than saying "stopping it at the source would be better" (which is unambiguously agreeable).

Teaching a man to fish is obviously better than just giving him a fish, but if tuition is not possible due to resource constraints, a fish distribution system isn't a terrible idea.

I am stating the position that the ability for governments to block part of the Internet rather than it being all or nothing is a net negative for the world.

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