Back in October, Walled Culture wrote about the grandly-named “Piracy Shield”. This is Italy’s new Internet blocking system, which assumes people are guilty until innocent, and gives the copyright industry a disproportionate power to control what is available online, no court orders required. Piracy Shield went live in December, and has just issued its first …
Not the case at all around here (Portugal), the blocks are quick and ISPs don’t even complain, they simply comply. What the law says is that there’s a govt entity called IGAC that is allowed to ask ISPs to block a website (domain name) as long as the website is flagged as containing / hosting piracy or other form of copyright infringement. The only requirement is that IGAC has to notify the website owner asking to remove the content prior blocking. After 48 if the website is still hosting said content then IGAC will ask the ISPs to block it.
Since this is all DNS based one can, obviously, set their DNS servers as Google or Cloudflare and bypass the block. Now the problem is that this is all fun and games until someone in the govt decides to go against Cloudflare and other DNS providers, the law would allow them to easily do it the way its written.
I mean if even one of those just shuts down service in or for Portugal the entire Internet is fucked instantly. AWS, Cloudflare and Google(rather Alphabet, the cooperation behind Google) are the literal spine of the internet. If you decide to go against them you dig your own grave and take the whole economy with you. Like cloudflare alone shoulders around 80% of the web.
Yes, but what if the govt just politely tells them “look, we’ve a law about piracy and we think you should block websites at the DNS level like our ISPs are doing”. Do you think Google / Cloudflare will fight it? They already have mechanisms for that in place for parental controls etc. so… the effort of adding a block list for a country shouldn’t be a big deal.
But they don’t want to comply, that’s the point, they don’t need to fight because nobody dares to even suggest something ridiculous like that, and yes they would go to court over that just so their lawyers have something to work on its peanuts for them and they absolutely don’t want anyone to interfere with their stuff.
Its not a big deal from a technical perspective, but for them its a big issue with their beliefs, especially for cloudflare.
And then there are still all the custom DNS that can just go around that all.
That’s some authoritarian shitshow right there. But i think its not a violation of EU laws or agreements.
😂 😂 😂 well the irony is that this is the kind of “authoritarian shitshow” we got by electing the left. That and a tax on digital storage (flash drives, disks etc) because they might be used to hold piracy. Even phones are taxed.
We have that tax in Germany as well, its completely ridiculous and a audacity that this shit exists.
Great piece of shit of a tax indeed.
I wish a slow and painful death to whoever made up that bs. (metaphorically, for legal reasons)