From Iran to Italy: Internet Censorship
Over 90 million Iranians have been cut off from the internet. International phone calls have stopped working. The Iranian government is hunting down Starlink satellite internet users (the only people that can communicate outside the country).
The Iranian casualty count is between 2,000 to 12,000 people in the past four days. For comparison, Ukraine has had roughly 14,000 casualties and the number is over 150,000 in Sudan. Media coverage for casualties is inversely proportional to internet accessibility and shareable video content.
“It is the only way,” said Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, co-founder of Iran Human Rights, both based in Norway. He said he received footage of protests in Mashhad, Iran’s second largest city by population.
A user in Tehran, who spoke to The Wall Street Journal through a Starlink connection early Sunday, said he had uploaded protest videos taken by relatives. He then sent them to third parties abroad who posted them on social media.
In Italy, Cloudflare faces unappealable fines because they are refusing to cut off internet access based on whims of an Italian regulatory body. The fine is roughly double the total revenue that Cloudflare makes from the entirety of Italy.
Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet. The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any sites a shadowy cabal of European media elites deemed against their interests. No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency. It required us to not just remove customers, but also censor our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver meaning it risked blacking out any site on the Internet. And it required us not just to censor the content in Italy but globally.
The European Commission has issued over €20 billion in antitrust and data-protection fines since 2017. Fines are based on a global revenue and targets platforms.
Conveniently, Europe has no successful platform companies. So all fines end up being directed at American companies.
Europe should not dictate internet accessibility policies onto American companies. Imagine if a relative comes to live at your house, tells you what you do, and then takes your money for not doing what they told you. Yet, that’s what’s happening.
An open internet is the biggest safety net for all people around the world. Our country is imperfect. We disagree on a wide variety of topics. But an open internet is one issue we should agree upon.