Cloudflare CEO on the Italy Fines
Key topics
As Italy slapped Cloudflare with a whopping €14 million fine for refusing to filter out pirate sites on its public 1.1.1.1 DNS, the company's CEO sparked controversy with a tweet that left many scratching their heads. Some commenters couldn't help but call out the apparent hypocrisy, pointing out that Cloudflare's advocacy for an open internet rings hollow given their own business practices. The thread erupted into a heated debate, with some defending Cloudflare as a publicly traded company doing its job, while others accused the CEO of prioritizing business interests and engaging in attention-seeking rhetoric. Amidst the chaos, a few astute observers noted that Cloudflare's praise for Elon Musk and US leadership seemed to be a telling indicator of their true motivations.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
7m
Peak period
110
0-6h
Avg / period
17.8
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Jan 9, 2026 at 11:46 AM EST
2d ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Jan 9, 2026 at 11:54 AM EST
7m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
110 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Jan 11, 2026 at 5:02 PM EST
1h ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Feels like engagement bait for attention seeking. No doubt they'll still keep the Olympics contracts as they are.
'Is praising an adversary on a single issue the same as praising them'. Yes, yes it is
cloudflare have deliberately designed their network so that every IP can serve up every cloudflare website
this means a court order can't block a single cloudflare site without blocking every cloudflare site, causing massive collateral damage
I suspect this is a deliberate business decision: an attempt to raise the "cost" of blocking so high that courts won't attempt to do it at all
and then they make arguments about "it's not technically possible", when it is (farm the target of the orders off to a separate pool of IPs)
and for DNS they could apply a filter based on the source IP country of origin
Prince: please, please, please exercise your empty threat, and withdraw your shitty company's services from Italy
and then you'll watch as Italy then raises it at the EU level, and then you'll have to do the same there too
Not true. Cloudflare can't block only a single web site _by IP address_ but that's pretty common with IPv4, The same is true of Fastly and AWS and I'd be shocked if there's a mass-market CDN out there that has a unique IPv4 address per customer.
They can absolutely block any site they want at the application layer (SNI or Host header or whatever they use, IDK, I'm a network guy).
fortunately you only need to farm out the ones out that are under court orders
> They can absolutely block any site they want at the application layer (SNI or Host header or whatever they use, IDK, I'm a network guy).
these court orders usually work by getting end user ISPs (which are regulated) to block or reroute the IP and/or DNS entry
neither of which can be realistically done due to conscious decisions by cloudflare
A government agency in Italy which is known nation-wide to complain and fine other institutions for the stupidest and pettiest reasons, fined another institution for a stupid and petty reason. But of course, ignorant people just see this single occurrence and make up conspiracy theories about it. (Really, if you looked at some examples of previous fines and complaints by AGCOM you would laugh your ass off independently of your political stance)
I'm not sure if I'm not getting something. It's a for-profit organization vs a government entity. It's not even remotely similar.
He event went as far as personally canceling a Tesla customer's order for criticizing him. That's how petty he is. He has no interest in freedom of speech whatsoever, it's merely a talking point.
Freedom of Speech guarantees the right to speak. Not the right to have no repercussions.
Elon has GREAT interest in Freedom of Speech, it enables him to have far more power than regulating the type of "speech" he showed in cancelling that customer's order.
How is that different from, say, Freedom of Theft guaranteeing the right to steal, but not the right to have no repercussions?
By these definitions, everyone has these “rights”?
But really it is a citizen, Elon Musk, exercising their property rights. The fact that he claims that such restrictions should not be applied to speech he likes is the problem.
When the house is digital (twitter is), why even use spray paint as the analogy?
However, as a defense of Papa Elon, it is ironic. Must and his lickspittles claim that online platform should not be allowed to block whatever speech they want.
Except speech they don't like. Like plane locations.
Pretending to take a principled stand against censorship but then randomly throwing flowers to two of the biggest threats to freedom of expression is deeply unserious, and makes it really hard to take his reaction seriously. And let's not forget that really vile AI image that is sure to alienate all Italians against Cloudflare.
So, we absolutely can get stuff done, the Americans just keep buying us up (DeepMind) or stealing it or using initimidation (Graphene) or espionage (of Airbus for benefit of Boeing way back).
But you have to keep in mind that this is the same as not being able to get stuff done :) Economies don't exist in a vacuum.
If a US company can buy an EU company out,
* business conditions in the EU are not favorable enough for people to want to grow their business in the EU (they would rather sell to the US);
* there are no EU companies that are competitive enough to counteroffer (meaning the EU has not created an environment to grow competitive businesses).
"Getting stuff done" isn't determined in a vacuum, so unless the EU totally isolates its economy it has to deal with the fact that it needs to actually encourage innovation and business to be competitive and "get stuff done" on the world stage.
We had more before Reddit and Metabook centralised so many.
I think we will be fine thanks
How is he expecting the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics to influence some representative of media right holders who have fined Cloudflare? Is he assuming that just because all of the listed things are Italian they can just make the fine go away?
> We can’t offer free services in a country that fines us millions unreasonably. Fix your government or lose access to our charity.
On one hand, I agree with you, it's problematic to threaten collective punishment. However, I don't think it's unreasonable to "divest" from a country trying to fine you for behavior outside of said country. It's also important to communicate that clearly, and unfortunately bluntly. Did you have a different expectation or suggestion for what they should do?
I think his hubris makes him overestimate Cloudflare's importance for Europe. Cloudflare is simply not important enough. If it was Microsoft or Apple threatening, then maybe - but those companies are clever enough to leverage lobbying for this.
Now the Cloudflare CEO has set himself up to be at the whims of JD Vance/Trump, while providing a perfect "arrogant US tech company" scapegoat that can be slaugthered by European politics and the media conglomerate that he is threatening.
Europe is too important for USA. I don't think the US administration will like the relationship to go sour at this very point in time just because of this Cloudflare doofus barking around.
Anyways, it is like Facebook CEO and Amazon CEO applauding the Trump inauguration; it is a totally unnecessary political statement which fragments their userbase and introduces a political dimension to any procurement decision involving Cloudflare. It takes people's illusion that Cloudflare is a neutral tech company and replaces it with this guy's twitter ramblings, who is obviously an Elon Musk and JD Vance fanboy.
What we need is an international legal framework for the Internet. And that includes compromises on all sides. China, EU, Russia, US and others have very different understanding on what is right. But hey, I think US politics is America first and cancel all international treaties. Sounds like more problems like this are incoming.
My take was, If you need help from the current State Department, or the current administration, (and I assume they do) it absolutely is a necessary statement. And then, this is them trying very hard to suck up, as is required, without pissing off everyone.
Perhaps I'm wrong, and this is actually a form of honesty, instead of performative theater. In which case I would probably agree with you. It's unfortunate. But I default to the assumption that people aren't children by choice.
When you say "for USA", what do you mean by "USA"?
Are you talking about the general US population? US corporations? Or the person who decides foreign policy direction (i.e., Trump)?
Because Trump recently ordered the snatching of a foreign head of state because he didn't like how the guy danced and allegedly didn't take him seriously.
It sounds like you're just upset the Cloudflare CEO sides with conservatives on this particular issue.
> We can’t offer free services in a country that fines us millions unreasonably.
This is normal and reasonable.
> Fix your government or lose access to our charity.
This is petulant and smug.
My suggestion for what they could have done differently is have a PR team handle the public announcements.
TBF what they did here is probably more effective than my plan, but only because the world is a trash fire.
I think this clearly shows the hubris of Cloudflare CEO. Cloudflare is simply not important enough in Europe, and he unnecessarily provided a scapegoat "evil US tech company" for European media and politicians to slaughter. In terms of corporate politics it's not clever for him to attach his name to this issue, why not let legal handle this through EU lobby channels the same way other US tech companies do it in Europe.
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
Seriously, what good has ever come out of that cess pit.
Yes, that’s a stance that is playing with fire. But is it wrong?
It's much less obvious that we want private corporations (or governments) picking and choosing which sites are good or bad. And from Cloudflare's position, a policy of "we don't police content" is more defensible than "we don't police content, except of this one in particular". These definitely aren't the only two horrible, racist websites Cloudflare has hosted.
IIRC (and take this memory with a grain of salt), one thing that angered eastdakota about Stormfront was that they kept saying something like "Cloudflare hasn't kicked us off, so they're okay with us" or something like that. And obviously that doesn't hold water, unless Cloudflare has chosen to kick of some sites, it lends some credence to the remaining ones.
I'm undecided where I stand on it. I'd like them to take actions like this in a principled way. (And I'm happy to accept that there's no clear line to draw, nor that it can be enforced with 100% accuracy, but if you're drawing a line, do it thoughtfully and broadcast it so you know ahead of time if you're in their gray area.)
According to many on HN at the time, freedom of speech and true journalism.
But then this place always clutches its pearls and cries for the nazis and the transphobes. It's so tragic when the most innocent amongst us are victims of the ruthless woke mob and their endless culture war. /s.
Don't be fooled. People like Elon aren't pro-free speech. They only want their speech. For example on Elon's X you can call people all kinds of things but calling someone "CIS gendered" is a ban-able offense [1]. Linking to other platforms was also forbidden for a while and in the H1B discussion X shadow banned a bunch of people [2] and I could go on for a while.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2023/07/02/elon-mus... [2] https://www.newsweek.com/laura-loomer-elon-musk-x-twitter-h1...
Do as I say, not as I do.
The only conflict is that Europeans don't want Russian Misinformation and Manipulation from foreign powers onto them. It's no accident that Musks X serves preferentially content from European Far-Right Parties.
The US used the same argument for their TikTok-Ban/Forced Takeover. They also don't make a secret out of their plan to push the far-right to end the EU. They even wrote about this in their new National Security Strategy
Pure Hypocrisy
How is the "far right" gonna end "the EU"? When my GF walks alone at night through the parks she's never EVER afraid of the mythical far right for her safety, but the other people the far left won't let us talk about without being called a label and being cancelled from MSM for having common sense opinions.
So if the EU were to find its end, it will be 100% at the hand of its own making, from years of corruption and financial mismanagement, from years of pushing unpopular open borders far left policies that nobody was asked it they agree with them or not. That's what will end the EU. Not Musk, not X, not Putin, not Trump, but the EU bureaucrats and their unpopular policies who then use boogiemen like X and "russian misinformation" and "far right" as scapegoats to deflect from their failures like this:
Corruption being exposed on X? Must be Russian misinformation. Illegal migrant crime exposed on X. Must be far right misinformation. Epstein Files? Democrat hoax. Etc but you get the point.
Politicians hate accountability and media channels they can't control like X that risk exposing their mistakes and corruption. They want full control of media to tell you what's acceptable to think, since the internet and social media made traditional state controlled media obsolete. They don't want control of social media and user ID verification to "protect the children", they want it to protect themselves from criticism and accountability from you.
It's not Elon's or Trump's or Putin's or the far right's fault the healthcare in my country has been on a decline for 10+ years. It's not their fault wages are stagnating but property prices are skyrocketing which is what most voters care about. That's the fault of the ECB fiscal policies. It's not their fault public safety is down and crime is up. That's the fault of EU border control and irresponsible migration policies. Etc. you get the point.
So it's disingenuous at best and bad faith at worst, to ignore these long going systemic issues the EU has self inflicted on its voters, and just blame the far right for the backlash it has inevitably lead to.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/crime-statistics-knife-crime-drugs-lif...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj38m11218xo
It's not that the far right is blameless, oh no, the problem is the double standards used in the media to demonize one group just for speaking on takes that were bipartisan common sense takes less than 20 years ago, while washing acts of murder and terrorist attacks of the others.
> X is the biggest help for foreign power to sow discord among us [2]
It's funny you say this when the BBC in the example from your first point was caught cutting and splicing Trump's Jan-6 speech to make a fake statement he never said[1] and is now facing defamation. Biased and coopted legacy media institutions like the BBC are the enemy here and why X is growing everywhere.
It's not that X isn't becoming an issue per-se, but X grew organically because legacy media like the BBC was caught lying and manipulating information so many times that people abandoned it leaving a vacuum that X easily filled. So if you have politics now ban or speech control X, people will notice the deception over time, and slowly abandoned the platform just like they abandoned BBC, and they'll go somewhere else to a new platform that doesn't even yet exist. Rinse and repeat.
When will politicians learn, that soviet speech control and propaganda tactics never hold long term?
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bbc-apologizes-trump-jan-6-edit...
> ...that lead to brainwashing of Charlie Kirk's shooter.
Oh, you have evidence of his political views now? Last I saw members of the admin were declaring them an antifa trans super soldier until it came out that he was a mormon from a conservative family which muddied the water and suddenly they didn't want to talk about it anymore.
If you want to make a claim about far left echo chambers you should reference a group like the Zizians.
> It's funny you say this when the BBC in the example from your first point was caught cutting and splicing Trump's Jan-6 speech to make a fake statement he never said[1] and is now facing defamation. Biased and coopted legacy media institutions like the BBC are the enemy here and why X is growing everywhere.
Ah the video from the speech that was edit to make it seem like he called for violence on J6 instead of the full length speech, where he called for violence on J6.
To the EU, it doesn't matter much if it's the Republicans or the Democrats doing it. What matters is that the USA is trying to interfere with the EU's political landscape.
It would be bad if they pushed the extreme left, too. They just happen to be pushing the extreme right.
(The reason right-wing political violence is more talked about in the EU is also rather simple: It is much more prevalent. https://www.bka.de/DE/UnsereAufgaben/Deliktsbereiche/PMK/PMK...)
Since you brought up European history, let me ask you where the far right came from in WW2 Europe. Did they just suddenly come out of nowhere and manage to take over a continent just like that without having majority popular support amongst the population? Or was it an organic growth gaining political support feeding off the backlash to failed policies of previous administrations in Europe?
Because history is repeating itself right now and you're either not seeing it because you don't know the answer to the historial question above, or you are ignoring it because you don't like it and you hope draconical measures against far right parties is the magic solution to turn all those displeased citizens to stop supporting far right, instead of making it worse by radicalizing them even further leading to more extremism which is what is actually gonna happen.
You're basically creating a self fulfilling prophecy.
> and it has nothing to do with parks at night
It 100% has everything to do with that. Because if you import millions of potentially dangerous and culturally incompatible third worlders from dangerous low trust societies into (formerly) safe European high trust societies, against the will of the majority of your voters making them now feel unsafe in their own countries, and you refuse to backtrack on your unpopular policies, then voting far right is the only peaceful and democratic option the voters have to express their displeasure with your policies.
And you can only ignore, ban and suppress the demands of the far right parties for so long, until they become the majority of voter base, and then you're fucked and the prophecy you were trying to stop fulfills itself, the far right takes power and uses all the political weapons you built to suppress them against you. Just like 80 years ago.
People are doomed to have history repeats itself on themselves because people never learn, or they learn the wrong lessons due to ideological biases giving themselves a false sense of moral superiority over the others they disagree with.
People always have reasons for wanting to censor speech.
> Pure Hypocrisy
Ironic.
The distinction isn't about "valid" vs "invalid" opinions, as you framed it, it's just about authenticity and coordination. A Russian citizen genuinely expressing pro Kremlin views on their personal account is exercising speech. A state funded operation running hundreds of fake accounts pretending to be American citizens, artificially amplifying divisive content, is something different, it's basically a form of information warfare.
And what I write here isn't theoretical, coordinated influence operations have inflamed ethnic tensions from the Balkans to Myanmar, not to mention Russian-Ukraininan conflict propaganda. These aren't just "opinions we disagree with", they're documented operations with measurable effects on real world violence. I mean this is a form of war, in which some countries want to destroy your society fabric for their advantage.
Every democracy already makes this distinction in other domains. Foreign governments can't donate to political campaigns. Foreign agents must register when lobbying. Do you call them violations of free speech? They're just acknowledgments that coordinated foreign influence is fundamentally different from citizen discourse.
The difficulty of drawing lines doesn't mean no lines exist.
No, I said because it's hard to distinguish, therefore we can not use it as an excuse to enact censorship.
> By that logic, we couldn't prosecute fraud
Fraud is illegal.
> couldn't have espionage laws
Espionage is illegal.
No matter what you do or what you write, enacting "desinformation laws" would require a ministry of truth to decide what is fact and what isn't, a task governments are famously incredibly bad at because they always have vested interests in not telling the truth.
> A state funded operation running hundreds of fake accounts pretending to be American citizens, artificially amplifying divisive content, is something different, it's basically a form of information warfare
And yet it is still speech and not distinguishable from genuine Russians sharing their opinions. It is easy to refute the opinions of many a people by discrediting them to be of the origin of a manufactured propaganda machine. Once you start doing this for foreign people, the next logical step is to continue this strategy for local activists or political opponents.
> And what I write here isn't theoretical, coordinated influence operations have inflamed ethnic tensions from the Balkans to Myanmar, not to mention Russian-Ukraininan conflict propaganda. These aren't just "opinions we disagree with", they're documented operations with measurable effects on real world violence. I mean this is a form of war, in which some countries want to destroy your society fabric for their advantage
I know this to be factual. I'm not denying it's existence at all. I'm making a point here. I don't want the government to hold these tools you propose. Any law enacted and every power given will not only be wielded by a government of parties you support, but also at one point by factions you disagree with entirely.
The "marketplace of ideas" doesn't function when one participant is a state apparatus with unlimited resources pretending to be thousands of organic voices. Your slippery slope argument applies to laws we already have and accept. Lets take US as an example, the Foreign Agents Registration Act has existed since 1938. Foreign campaign contributions are illegal. These laws require distinguishing foreign influence from domestic speech. By your logic, these should have already devolved into tools of domestic political persecution. Have they? Imperfect enforcement, sure. But "the government of a faction I disagree with might someday abuse this" hasn't been a reason to repeal FARA.
Another issue that I have with your argument is that you've identified risks of action but proposed nothing. What's your actual framework here? If coordinated foreign information warfare is real and harmful, and ongoing (which you acknowledge) what should democracies do? I mean if your answer is "nothing, because any tool could theoretically be abused" then you are not offering any policy, right? but basically you are arguing for resignation.
The issue I have with your argument is that you're treating action as a necessary evil enacted by a well meaning government. It isn't.
> I mean we're ceding the information space to whoever is willing to manipulate it most aggressively.
I am well aware that this is a difficult thing to solve. What is it then, that you propose we do?
> These laws require distinguishing foreign influence from domestic speech. By your logic, these should have already devolved into tools of domestic political persecution. Have they?
Yes. YES. The FARA has sometimes been applied asymmetrically, especially against individuals or organizations connected to political opponents, lobbyists and think tanks. It is the perfect example for what I mean. The FARA is broadly defined and with a DOJ under an administration, it is prone to misuse. The DOJ under Trump considered to use it to charge Hunter Biden. The identification of "hostile agents" that you argue is necessary is exactly what I mean when I point to government misuse, as the Trump admin is currently using these exact laws to identify activists and nonprofits as domestic terrorists [1]. We have people in this thread decry the Trump administration for their actions and stances on selectively applying free speech while they at the same time argue for more government power even while it is being abused in this very moment. I am aghast at how this is happening.
> Another issue that I have with your argument is that you've identified risks of action but proposed nothing. What's your actual framework here? If coordinated foreign information warfare is real and harmful, and ongoing (which you acknowledge) what should democracies do?
Do what democracy's are already doing. Issue sanctions that hurt. A large amount of LNG and gas imports in Europe are still traceable to Russia. Invest into digital thinking and digital literacy. But that would require putting your money where your mouth is, instead of arguing for those sweet tools of citizen control. Germany spends below average on education and our pupils suffer. The same is true for US education. Sorry, but I won't argue for controlling a stupid populace when we fail at teaching at the same time.
[1]: https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/how-nspm-7-seeks...
If your defense for going after fraud and espionage is its illegal, are you fine if a country makes censorship legal?
You are all over this thread in god knows how many comments arguing about Germany and world wide censorship whereas this thread - and the fine - is about copyright and Italy. The second they use it for anything else I'll be happy to jump the line but until then they are - for once - using this law as it is intended and it doesn't really matter that there are other unrelated wrongs that you could commit using the same mechanism.
In his free time Ivan comes to HN and poses as a free speech absolutist.
Jokes aside, the Harris campaign openly manipulated Reddit to get their opinions on the top [1]. I was there on election night. The entire site slowed to a crawl. Opinions of people you normally never read gained hundreds to thousands of upvotes. It felt organic for exactly one day.
[1]: https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/29/busted-the-inside-story...
I am not an absolutist, far from it, and I'm pretty sad that you feel the need to resort to personal attacks, even if indirect.
This is a great way of bombing its business in the EU. Just sayin' :)
100% support whatever Cloudflare has to do to win this fight. IMO the timing of something like this in the middle of the Elon + X vs UK censorship fight with the current administration providing support is probably the best case scenario.
People aren't going to want to hear that, but in this case it's probably true.
No, it was explicitly created to receive and study the stream of "garbage traffic" being sent to 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1, which were previously held by APNIC and donated to Cloudflare on this basis. https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/
> APNIC's research group held the IP addresses 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. While the addresses were valid, so many people had entered them into various random systems that they were continuously overwhelmed by a flood of garbage traffic. APNIC wanted to study this garbage traffic but any time they'd tried to announce the IPs, the flood would overwhelm any conventional network.
> We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. We offered Cloudflare's network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.
Whilst ending swathe of agreements, threatening to end NATO and threatening to attack a NATO territory.
2. Tech donated to Vance (and Trump) under the understanding that they would be a protected class.
3. By tagging Vance publicly and directly, he’s calling a favor.
4. If Vance doesn’t take action, it’s a signal that he’s not worth investing in.
That's a polite way of saying Thiel successfully installed a puppet as the heir apparent to the most powerful position in the world.
I think it's work noting the quotes around the pro-bono. As outlined by Matthew Prince (Co-founder & CEO, CloudFlare):
> Bandwidth Chicken & Egg: in order to get the unit economics around bandwidth to offer competitive pricing at acceptable margins you need to have scale, but in order to get scale from paying users you need competitive pricing. Free customers early on helped us solve this chicken & egg problem. Today we continue to see that benefit in regions where our diversity of customers helps convince regional telecoms to peer with us locally, continuing to drive down our unit costs of bandwidth.
* https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/88685
* Via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42712433#unv_42712845
It is not charity but a business decision that benefits them.
Of course it benefits them, it's a private enterprise, not a local government providing trash service.
No one also can force them to provide such a service, try to control their global operations which is outside of Italy's jurisdiction, and if they're not making any more they can pack their stuff and leave.
Then I read what you're talking about:
> [...] we are considering the following actions: [...] 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; [...]
That's punishing all of Italy's users including those whose job it is to call truth to power (Project Galileo is free for journalists). If my state had a similar spat with Cloudflare would we be in danger of losing the infrastructure we've grown to depend on?
I was complacent and we need to re-think our relationship with them. It's true what they say: there's no such thing as a free lunch.
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/galileo/
But as a middle manager of a small nonprofit who makes decisions for my org's web infrastructure I have to make sure our organization's infra doesn't become part of a bargaining chip in a future conflict between a giant company and our government.
Businesses might not care whether he tweets at JD Vance or Taylor Swift, but the risk of having your website shut down because the CEO of your firewall vendor has a psychological breakdown on Twitter is unacceptable.
It is Friday evening in Europe and the fact that Cloudflare leadership and Cloudflare legal team couldn't put out a statement to mitigate this situation within the last 5 hours shows that this guys could run the company into the ground within blink of an eye.
Remember, some weeks ago Cloudflare had an outage because of an extremely stupid engineering mishap, today it is an extremely stupid leadership mishap. How many more strikes should they be granted?
Absolutely. And if any of their competitors claims they can guarantee that they won't ever (have to) pull out of some somewhere for political reasons, they're lying or ignorant. You cannot escape politics. A single election or new law can redraw the landscape overnight. Refusing or ignoring the game just makes it more likely you'll become a casualty of it.
Cloudflare is a business. If the fines for operating are several times the money it can get from Italian users, why should it stay in Italy at all?
It's like when Wikipedia went dark for a day. It punished all users, but the point is to show that politicians are forcing it to do so.
Plenty of activists on the other side of the spectrum note of "greenwashing" and "pinkwashing", nice words about the environment or LGBT+ rights without any noticeable action beyond adding a temporary pride badge to social media accounts in pride month or a picture of a wind turbine on their website.
877 more comments available on Hacker News