ISPs in Spain are blocking CDN IP ranges to tackle soccer piracy (original) (raw)

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From: nanog--- via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2025 12:51:50 +0200

On 15/04/25 03:38, Constantine A. Murenin wrote:

Also, the same principle that prevents Spain from selectively blocking a single Cloudflare site, also prevents me, as a network administrator, in the privacy of my own home, from blocking ads and other undesirable resources throughout the entirety of my home network, on all devices, in bulk.

You control the endpoints of the communication, so you may install uBlock Origin in your browser.

Unless your browser happens to run on an iPhone, in which case - you had free choice to buy a phone that supported ad-blocking or one where you were prevented from ad-blocking, so you have nobody to blame for that choice but yourself.

Unless you live in one of those weird social circles where the text bubbles have to be blue or you get ostracized.

And after the ability to do this network-wide blocking has been removed, Cloudflare's partners are also slowly but surely removing the ability to block said content within your own endpoint devices, too, by removing all the ad-blockers from all the stores, and preventing relevant API access from within the browser, too; plus making it a ToS violation to alter website contents through a plug-in. Sorry, but Cloudflare is not a good guy in this story.

Absolutely. Don't buy those products. Encourage everyone you know to not buy those products. They'll get the message eventually.

The web may well split in two: a free one, and an enslaved one. It will be a real shame if the enslaved-net overlaps 100% with the hard-to-censor-net. It will probably overlap 100% with the do-not-want-to-censor-net, because most large content companies bend the knee immediately at the slightest threat of blocking. To some extent, this sort of thing already happened with Tor.

A network serves one master, but an inter-network, being comprised of many networks, serves many masters. All that can be done in protocol design is to make it all-or-nothing, on purpose, which is why things have been going this way in the past 30 years of protocol design. By aligning incentives a certain way, the least bad tradeoff for each master is to maximize access to information. When you're a dictator who can suppress dissent for no cost, you do so. When you're a dictator who can only suppress dissent by destroying everything that you rule over, you resign because all outcomes are bad for you. Think of it like the second amendment of the internet, or mutually assured destruction.

I don't like Cloudflare but they are in the right in this particular situation. We'll see whether Spain can politically tolerate shutting down half the internet during football matches. Remember, Italy made the same decision several months ago, but quickly reversed it and went so far as to pretend it never happened. If it wasn't like this with Cloudflare, they'd probably block a handful of small hosting provider ASNs permanently. Is that good?

(this is a quote - formatting accidentally removed because Thunderbird is terrible) Not quite, because the entire Wikipedia in all languages is then simply blocked, so, they're not even able to read any of the other articles from Wikipedia either, in any language. This violates primal protocol design principles of flexibility and resilience, business continuity and backwards compatibility.

(my answer)

Flexibility for who? Resilience for who?

A protocol which gives dictators the flexibility to resiliently block dissent isn't necessarily a good thing, unless you're the dictator. (Are you?)

A protocol which gives political dissidents the flexibility to resiliently communicate with each other seems better, doesn't it? You can't have both. It's flexible and resilient for one or the other. (Or neither, in which case it sucks)

Are you trying to make one single internet, which implies that local administrators cannot selectively block things, or are you trying to make a fragmented internet where you're only connected to part of it and which part depends on how you connect?

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