Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by inglor_cz 47 days ago
I fervently hope that no one manages to obtain a similar judgment at the pan-EU level, that would be a disaster.
3 comments

I don't think there's an injunction mechanism like that at the EU level

And even if there were I doubt the legal basis in EU law exists for such an injunction

yet
I actually hope they do. this will force a proper reckoning about the situation and maybe a proper fix.
On the one hand, I would tend to agree that making things painful enough might force people to stop ignoring and improve things. On the other, after seeing waves hands at everything since 2016 makes me very skeptical of accelerationism: sometimes things just get worse and worse, there's no bottom to bounce from. Or maybe we just never really hit rock bottom?
Well, this very article is describing how popular outrage in Spain is forcing the legislature to take action against La Liga.

(Yes, the action described in the article is explictly not legally binding. That was also true of the Brexit vote.)

Given much of the internet today, I'm not sure if a pan-EU level blocklist on all of cloudflare (damaging as that would be) would even be worse than the status-quo, let alone rock bottom.
That'd likely lead to Cloudflare not being used much in the EU if the service is frequently disrupted. That could be a good thing to prevent their monopoly.
Eventually, some apparatchik will try to access pornhub during a sports match and fail, it'll resolve the issue quickly
The bottom is just so much farther down than we remember. Tremendous progress was made in the 20th century, particularly in the aftermath of WWII, and we've kind of just been coasting on it for 50 years.

Accelerationism was always a terrible idea.

The premise of accelerationism isn't to destroy the world, it's to escape a local maxima.

You have some medium-okay but clearly sub-optimal status quo and then a bunch of defenders resisting all change because "things are fine" even though they should be better than fine, or institutions that have been captured by corrupt interests but that situation is stable as long as they continue to provide bread and circuses. If it stays mediocre then everyone muddles along; if it gets worse then people stop ignoring the issue and actually address it so that it gets better.

The problem is, it's not just bread and circuses. People have been divided into camps for the purpose of directing their dissatisfaction against each other instead of the entities responsible.

So people get mad when things go wrong but the perpetrators convince them that the enemy is their neighbors and they need to direct their resources to defeating each other instead of working together to solve the actual problems.

For example, when SOPA/PIPA was defeated, it not only wasn't just along party lines, there was more opposition to it from Republicans than Democrats:

https://projects.propublica.org/sopa/pipa.html

So who we like here are e.g. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rand Paul (R-KY), because they both opposed it, even though they're in different parties. But then the "parties matter, not candidates" people would have you trying to oust everyone with the disfavored letter next to their name even if they did the right thing there. Which helps the baddies win by convincing you to oust good candidates from the "bad" party in favor of bad candidates from the "good" party, and over time makes both parties worse even as people become increasingly dissatisfied with the way things are going.

It took tens of millions of dead to create the relative peace of the later 20th century, that is a hell of a rock bottom. We got the UN, nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, war crimes treaties, free trade, unprecedented prosperity. It's humanity's greatest achievement but we're throwing it all away. Partly due to attacks from monied interests and propagandists, partly to protect Israel (the 15th Crusade), partly because of hatred of peaceniks and bureaucrats, but largely because we've all forgotten the costly lessons.
At that scale, it might make Cloudflare customers reconsider their affiliations. It might not be as terrible.

By affecting only Spain, the impact is too small for most websites to care.

If they compelled Cloudflare to do so, what makes you think they couldn't compel whatever provider those customers then switch to?
What other provider than Cloudflare is out there that offers the things Cloudflare does? Why are people not already switching to them if they are available?
Telefonica, the telecom company who bought the rights of LaLiga and btained the judgement against cloudflare IPs, sells some of those services through its business services branch.
To say that Telefonica offers even remotely the same services and features that Cloudflare does is a lie at best.
The keyword was "some".
In the same way that a roadside lemonade stand run by a child offers some of the same services as a grocery store.
Akamai is the OG Cloudflare, just not as cool.
And costs 1000x more
Yes, trusting Cloudflare to be the arbiter of the internet will work out great.

Just as trying to make social media be the arbiter of speech...