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Nearly any company under a government's jurisdiction will comply to a legal order to censor content, especially if its done in the claimed goal of protecting children.

Those companies that don't comply will be shut down or targeted in some way if the legal order had any political teeth behind it.

There's no way around that unfortunately, short of limiting government power in the first place so such an order would never be lawful.





The problem with Cloudflare is that it does business everywhere, so it has to appease all governments.

If you're a news site registered in the US or a porn site registered in Canada, with relatively few ties in other countries, you have far much less pressure to comply with unreasonable demands from India or Bahrain. They just don't have that much leverage. If you use Cloudflare, they can put the pressure on Cloudflare instead.

To make matters worse, some governments will demand worldwide removal / blocking of certain content they don't like.

This is what makes the internet so weird and pre-internet intuitions about how governments work so treacherous.


that's why the gov't has somehow shut down torrenting and piracy. Oh wait...

Piracy is already operating outside of the law, there's no corporation to take legal action against, only individuals.

A company is (usually) operating within the law, and if they wish to stay operating, have to follow the laws of the nations they operate in.


in other words, i was trying to imply that the only way to prevent gov't overreach is to continue developing technical solutions which are distributed and decentralized, so that there's no single button for which the gov't could press for removal of these fundamental rights.



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