That's a bit rich coming from Cloudflare, a company that routinely blocks access to important and legitimate websites to huge parts of the world. A huge part of Cloudflare's customers use them specifically to block users' access to websites.
There's a big difference between a company making that decision (an edge provider) vs a country doing that at the network level.
The rub comes in that nations, including the U.S., have laws about what they seem illegal content or services and reserve the right to force those to be blocked.
In Thailand that might be criticism of the king; in the U.S., pirated TV streams; in another country, that could be gambling sites.
Cloudflare seems to be trying to stop blocking that is trade protectionism, but is blocking overseas gambling sites trade protection or a legit state interest in protecting its citizens?
Cloudflare has a significant enough marketshare it doesn’t seem to make a meaningful difference whether it’s blocked at this or that level, for the vast majority of end users.
As someone who has had to implement these blocks, it’s not generally done because anyone wants to, it’s because someone passed a law that requires us to do it. I don’t get to override the ITAR or Entities list just because I don’t feel it’s fair someone is on it.
Didn't CF CEO post in March 2019 that they were going to start working with govts on suggestions for how to implement laws that would get them to block things people didn't like?
Could be. Regulatory capture is evident in a lot of places. TurboTax isn’t accidentally a very easy to use Tax filing software. It gets things right I’ve had expensive CPAs get wrong. TurboTax has more lobbying dollars than the CPA with an office down the street.
