[lentil_soup]

> Cloudflare would rather not block websites without a court order specifying the sites to be blocked.

why would they?

> squabble between two huge corporations

I think this is just LaLiga using it's cultural and economical power, don't think Cloudflare or the courts should be making exceptions just so they can control how people watch football

[mlyle]

> why would they?

Well, in this case, the alternative is all of Spain intermittently blocking lots of Cloudflare.

But if Cloudflare bows to Spain in this case, every jurisdiction will want to pile up lots of special case rules for Cloudflare to try and implement.

[pxc]

LaLiga isn't Cloudflare's customer. They have no relationship. So why would Cloudflare rework their infrastructure just to instrument rapid blocking at their own expense as a favor to LaLiga? And if they don't, ISPs just break the Internet for each soccer match? This is a kind of coercion that makes no sense. Cloudflare has no obligation like this to LaLiga (and neither would a Spanish domestic CDN!).

[mlyle]

The reason why entities comply with the wishes of courts is because there's consequences if they don't. Consequences like being filtered.

[pxc]

Cloudflare has not in fact refused to comply with any court orders! The very thing at issue is that LaLiga wants Cloudflare to do censorship on their behalf that Cloudflare, who has no contractual relationship with LaLiga, is not required to do by any legal framework in Spain or the US.

Cloudflare literally wasn't even a party to the ruling by which LaLiga has been compelling Spanish ISPs to do the IP-level blocking. They're just an affected third-party because the blocking scheme the courts have allowed LaLiga to impose on ISPs is on a per-IP basis.

Spain hasn't asked Cloudflare to do anything. Only LaLiga has acted like Cloudflare owes them a huge, expensive rework of their CDN's architecture for the purpose of censoring things for LaLiga purely as a favor to LaLiga. What LaLiga has over Cloudflare isn't a court order. It's a protection racket, or maybe a hostage situation, where court orders involving other parties are the gun held to the hostage's head.

[mlyle]

> Cloudflare has not in fact refused to comply with any court orders!

Nor did I say they did.

The question was asked, "why would they [without an explicit order]" The answer is they probably shouldn't, but there's still an obvious incentive here.

[drob518]

So, lawsuits against LaLiga from parties with affected sites would be the path forward, right? Those might be difficult in Spanish courts.

[forty]

I'm not sure why it shouldn't be cloudflare job to make sure they don't host illegal content. If my super market keeps distributing illegal goods, even if they remove it after a court order, they will end up having to close the whole market.

Either they should police the content they serve themselves or they accept the right holders to do it (which sucks for everyone).

Also they certainly willing take all their customers as hostage, as they could certainly split their network into legitimate customers and shaddy ones so the blocking is not so impactful, but I guess they prefer to make it as impactful as possible to be able to complain.

[pxc]

https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/reporting-abuse/

Anyone can report illegal content on Cloudflare and Cloudflare will remove it. The pirate streaming sites pop up only in or just before the first few moments of the game, and LaLiga insists they must be removed instantly in order to prevent their losses. So what they actually want is preemptive removal without meaningful human review or anything else that could take 10 minutes.

That involves more than being responsive when someone reports abusive content or dropping bad customers. That requires becoming a censorship machine that preemptively treats all new customers as criminals, and probably having some unaccountable AI drive the censorship process. (That latter seems to be what LaLiga is pushing Fastly to do.)

That's beyond the legal obligations of infrastructure platforms, bad for the reliability of their service, and just a slice of what they'd have to do to rework their architecture to support this kind of preemptive censorship.

[gruez]

>why would they?

Plenty of companies proactively take action against shady users, even if not 100% required under law. Youtube has content id, social media companies have "community guidelines", and ISPs have AUPs.