I'm no fan of Cloudflare, but they're completely in the right on that. Infrastructure for blocking websites simply shouldn't exist.
Because if it's allowed to exist, it ends up subsumed by political and corporate interests, and becomes a tool of overreach and abuse. We've seen that happen over and over again.
If US Trade Office can be leveraged to destroy internet censorship efforts in other countries, then so be it.
> Infrastructure for blocking websites simply shouldn't exist.
I think people have forgotten how extreme a position this is: the idea that once something is on the internet, national law simply ceases to apply and governments should have absolutely zero control over obscene material, IP infringment, harassment, libel, foreign propaganda, money laundering, fraudulent financial services, gambling, and so on - simply because it's hosted in a different country.
Not even the US really believes that domestically .. or even when it comes to overseas enforcement, such as sending the FBI to New Zealand to get Kim Dotcom. Or the Pokerstars case.
Not to mention I am really skeptical of the magic invocation of "trade" to overrule national sovereignty. That leads you to stupid places such as Philip Morris trying to use the ISDS process to force Australia to accept an inherently poisonous product (fortunately they eventually lost). https://www.linklaters.com/insights/blogs/arbitrationlinks/2...
I think if something is hosted in a different country, the laws of that country apply to that service. It's not under your jurisdiction, so you have no say in whether it's allowed to exist, nor should you.
You can, of course, pass a law making it illegal for your citizens to communicate with that service, but I think it's really important to understand that that's what's happening. You are passing a law which applies to your citizens and their right to communicate with people in other countries; it's their freedoms you are placing limits on, not the freedoms of the foreign website. Sometimes when you frame things that way, such restrictions stop making sense. (Though perhaps not always.)
> I think people have forgotten how extreme a position this is: the idea that once something is on the internet, national law simply ceases to apply and governments should have absolutely zero control over obscene material, IP infringment, harassment, libel, foreign propaganda, money laundering, fraudulent financial services, gambling, and so on - simply because it's hosted in a different country.
This has more or less been the default position of most internet users and developers since the beginning, until fairly recently. I’d even contend that it’s what drew many of us to the internet in the first place. If the internet ever becomes cable TV, fully regulated, controlled, and managed, it will have lost its purpose as a place for free and open exchange of information.
(Zero control is an exaggeration—the worst lawbreakers still face justice under the current system, and that seems ok. I just don’t think we should be tightening the screws any further.)
> I think people have forgotten how extreme a position this is
If you can forget that a position is extreme, doesn't that imply that it's a relatively unoffensive and reasonable position? For actual extreme positions like "reduce housing scarcity by murdering some category of people" or "mitigate climate change by prohibiting human reproduction", does anyone need to be reminded that they're extreme?
> the idea that once something is on the internet, national law simply ceases to apply and governments should have absolutely zero control over obscene material, IP infringment, harassment, libel, foreign propaganda, money laundering, fraudulent financial services, gambling, and so on - simply because it's hosted in a different country.
Is this any different than the premise of sovereignty to begin with?
If you live somewhere gambling is illegal you can get on a flight to Las Vegas. If you want to buy a gun and go to the range to shoot it, or buy a piece of land where you can keep your gun, you can go to Texas, even though there are countries where guns and private land ownership by non-citizens are illegal. If you want to use certain drugs you can go to certain other countries.
Isn't the extreme position that a country should be able to control what you do even when you're willingly choosing to do it in another jurisdiction? Do the people own the government or does the government own the people?
Nobody's saying the government shouldn't be able to go after the owner of the site and force them to shut it down. It definitely shouldn't be done by third parties though.
It is a tough predicament we find our selves in. A totally free and open network is prone to exploitation by rampant abuse. A controlled and monitored network is prone to excessive restrictions.
There is a middle way that can kind of muddle along but it can be attacked by both sides for being both to strict and not being strict enough.
I notice foreign propaganda has sneaked in there. It wouldn't have been there 20 years ago. Then defending site blocking with the need to stop foreign propaganda would be seen as a huge self-goal.
People might even have assumed it was sarcastic, and that you didn't actually want site blocking, if you defended it that way.
I think people have forgotten how extreme that position used to be.
(Money laundering and anything involving payment and debts are also independent of site blocking - it's neither sufficient or necessary to block sites to do that.
It is kind of stupid when you think about what this stuff fundamentally is: digital files on someone's computer that you connected to. The analog, well, analog would be if the FBI had cctv into everyone's bookshelf and desk drawer. Some real Orwellian thought policing we hand wave away because the nature of the technology makes such surveillance logistically trivial in comparison.
Moderation is when you block information from me, because I don't want to see that information.
Censorship is when you block information from me, because you don't want me to see that information.
Cloudflare is the former. Or at least, that's what they want to do. Or say that they want to do. If you let someone or something do moderation on your behalf, there's always a good deal of trust involved, that they're not manipulating you by also blocking information you would have wanted to see. Moderation is not a trivial matter. But it's also not censorship.
They block traffic reaching your website, not the other way around. For a poor, nitpickable analogy: they keep the bad guys out of your home, but they don't want to take away homes from the bad guys.
it's not so much the US Trade Office, but this needs to be considered in any international trade agreements.
blocking that interferes with access to legitimate sites that i might use to buy or sell products and communicate with potential customers should be a violation of these agreements.
If content can be delivered over the internet, then content can also not be delivered over the internet. The only question is how surgical the ban hammer is.
Some countries simply disconnect themselves from the global internet on occasion to prevent content from being delivered.
> If US Trade Office can be leveraged to destroy internet censorship efforts in other countries, then so be it.
So by implication you're actually completely fine with other countries pursuing their own objectives for businesses that choose to trade in their country.
Because you cannot, possibly, in 2025, be making an argument that the USA's interpretation of the way of things is unimpeachable. That would be absurd and laughable.
I look forward to you explaining to Germans and Israelis why Nazi symbols and Nazi websites should be legal because banning them hurts a US tech company's interests.
I'm pretty sure you will receive a variety of opinions, some of them in large fonts with an invitation to print them and roll them up for storage.
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?
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.
Facebook is a single website. Other websites can host it just fine.
This is the same as blocking content on your own forum or comment section on your blog. Yes fb is huge, but still just a website, and one with fading popularity.
I'm not sure the US wants to bring attention to its massive trade surplus in services
if I was the EU I would have responded to the threats of goods tariffs with a threat of service tariffs that will start off slow and increase every month that tariffs remain in effect
initially 0% tax on Office 365/AWS/facebook+google ad sales, then after a year it's 20%, and so-on
That's exactly what they did. They didn't want to escalate the conflict, so they didn't end up using it. It's what they refer to as their "trade bazooka", and it's still around ready to be used.
It is a trade barrier... For services.
And that's the ciritical bit of information.
Most international trade agreements don't cover services in in a comprehensive manner. Because they are so varied and difficult to regulate. E.g. banking, sales, advice, software.
For Cloudflare it's obviously of commerical interest to establish a world wide level playing field.
I don't see it happening. Certainly not because of US trade interests. Because there is a serious lack of good will towards the USA, basically anywhere in the (rest of the) world right now, and services are a much bigger part of the economy than manufacted produce.
The trend I see is to decouple from the US, and China.
I genuinely couldn't reccomend my own country to make a deal with the USA on services. Because we already have a serious issue with the dominance of US cloud tech.
Previously the WTO ruled that USA had imposed illegal trade barriers against Antigua that violate the GATS treaty by attempting to criminalise any website in any country that takes wagers from Americans[0]. I'm pretty sure any site blocking effort would violate the same treaty, but those cases can't be taken to the WTO due to the USA blocking appointments to the WTO appellate body since 2019 [1]
The US lost in the gambling case because their restrictions on foreign websites were stricter than those on domestic ones. The GATS doesn't prohibit countries from regulating trade, they only have to do so in a non-discriminatory manner. Spain isn't blocking foreign websites for copyright infringement that would be legal domestically, so they're in compliance with their obligations.
i havent been in a tier 1 ISP in 20 years. can anyone who is in that life give a little summary of how much infrastructure we have in the united states to implement the same level of control as what china has available for walling its garden?
like, if the direction came down from on high, to copy it ... how few things would have to get flipped on to have roughly the same thing in the united states?
i'd really appreciate an insider's summary. a lot has changed since 2004. probably.
There are actually two part of mechanisms in China to wall its garden.
The first part is GFW, with which people outside of China is more familiar. It operates at every international internet cable, analyzing and dynamically blocks traffic in realtime. China only have few sites that connects to international internet, with very limited bandwidth (few Tbps in total), so it's more feasible. But overall speaking, this is the easy part.
The second part of walling a garden is about controlling what's inside the garden. Every website running in China mainland needs an ICP license from the government, which can take weeks. ISPs must be state-owned (there are 4 of them in total, no local small ISPs whatsoever). Residential IPs cannot be used for serving websites because the inbound traffic of well-known ports are blocked, which is required by the law. VPN apps are illegal. etc. These are things that are much harder to do in other countries.
> how few things would have to get flipped on to have roughly the same thing in the united states?
I'd argue it's already been flipped on. Our system just works a little bit differently. Nothing is strictly prohibited via some grand theatrical firewall. Things that are "undesirable" simply meet an information theoretical death sooner than they otherwise should. We've got mountains of tools like DMCA that can precision strike anything naughty while still preserving an illusion of freedom.
Data hoarders are the American version of climbing over the GFW. The strategy of relying on entropy to kill off bad narratives seems to be quite effective. Social media platforms, cloud storage, et. al., are dramatically accelerating this pressure.
> Things that are "undesirable" simply meet an information theoretical death sooner than they otherwise should.
A good example is how payment processors (mainly the major credit card companies) police adult sites, forcing them to ban certain keywords. It's a weird situation in which the role of morality police is played at the point where control can naturally be exercised in a capitalist economy.
As we'd expect, that same pattern is repeated elsewhere, e.g. in social networks that censor in all sorts of ways, many of them explicitly intended to reinforce the status quo and neutralize or undermine dissent.
When you have an authoritarian government, all of this tends to happen more centrally. But democracies tend to distribute this function throughout the economy and society.
The Great Firewall is, among various other things, an attempt to create a single historical narrative for the PRC by blocking out reference to things like Tiananmen, discussions of early twentieth-century China suggesting that China could have gone a different way than the Communist Party and prospered, etc. The USA has absolutely nothing like that, people can readily find open-web and social-media content taking every possible position on American history, both staid academic content and wacko conspiracy theory stuff.
When it all comes down to it, the USA just isn’t as hung up on social harmony and narrative control as the PRC. That’s why there isn’t a comparable system in place, and claiming that the odious DMCA is anywhere close, is hyperbole.
This comes from the dated perspective that free trade is universally good. Nations create their own trade rules and they ought to be able to enforce them. I consider that far preferable than attempts to exert extraterritorial control over services from other countries.
If, say, Uruguay doesn't like content on Facebook, they are free to block it. In their opinion, they are protecting their citizens and that's ok. It should not produce legal action that could result in least common denominator style global content censorship.
In an ideal world, there would be no country level blocking but invariably laws will differ.
> This comes from the dated perspective that free trade is universally good.
lol, ok, I'll bite. Other than one side might try to change the rules; why should I believe is free trade is no longer universally good? What is the specific argument?
Because if the argument is that one side might impose taxes, duh? But that's no longer free trade is it?
If both sides were willing to play fair, why wouldn't that be better? And why shouldn't we all be trying to "encourage" everyone to play fair?
There are many arguments but the most straightforward one is that a country may decide that preserving particular industries is in their security interest. That can be extended to culture as well.
Japan closed itself off from the world for centuries during the Edo period. One could say that they suffered economically due to that, but on the other hand, they ended up creating one of the more unique cultures in the world, developing in ways very different from others. It's an interesting kind of diversity.
Food production is a huge one. We don't want highly optimized farming where only the most efficient growers feed everyone else because that has the risk of global famine if something fails there. The more a system is optimized, the closer to failure it is. Same goes for all other kinds of production but food is really important compared to, say, CPUs or cars.
We have a technical mechanism now to be able to disambiguate the reputations of customers behind a single network - ASNs.
Why doesn't cloudflare require its more difficult customers to have an ASN - then their reputation and cloudflares can be more easily separated. This wouldn't have to rely on flimsy static IP lists either.
Cloudflare is right. But, it's a pretty typical EU play. Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.
In this case, hitting a massive number of small sites, which aren't engaged in piracy, to protect a few large entities from some other small piracy sites. It's what's happening in both Italy and Spain.
> But, it's a pretty typical EU play. Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.
It's funny that as soon as anything European (not even related to EU one bit) is mentioned, people find a way of pinning it on the European Union. The article has literally nothing to do with EU, and everything to do with individual European countries, yet you somehow found a way of blaming EU for it :)
Sincerely, Spanish internet user who gets blocked from half the internet every time a semi-popular football match is played in this country.
I was actually like 30 years old when I realized "EU" meant "European Union" and wasn't a 2 letter abbreviation for the continent of Europe. In the US, we call states by their two letter abbreviations (IL, NY, CA, etc), often call countries by 2 letter abbreviations too (depends on the country, but JP, AR, CR come to mind as common examples), so it's a pretty natural assumption to think of 'EU' as 'all of the continent Europe, independent of whether they participate in the governing body known as the European Union'
If you substitute the GP for 'pretty typical European play' it makes plenty of sense.
> It's funny that as soon as anything European (not even related to EU one bit)
Living in the US, I've noticed many Americans don't really make distinctions like that. They see "EU" as a kind of shorthand for "Europe", or something along those lines. Even the fact that the UK is no longer in the EU doesn't affect this - it's still part of what Americans think of as "the EU".
> Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.
I assume you must be American. I always find it funny that there is that US belief that Europe is "old-fashioned" with "old tech" and "old progress". I never encountered anyone yet to tell me what progress wasn't in Europe that was in the US.
I actually think this is a bit backward, with US lack of transportation funding, more people struggling with poverty, backward ecological measures, and missing health care with lower life expectancy.
Readit News
Because if it's allowed to exist, it ends up subsumed by political and corporate interests, and becomes a tool of overreach and abuse. We've seen that happen over and over again.
If US Trade Office can be leveraged to destroy internet censorship efforts in other countries, then so be it.
I think people have forgotten how extreme a position this is: the idea that once something is on the internet, national law simply ceases to apply and governments should have absolutely zero control over obscene material, IP infringment, harassment, libel, foreign propaganda, money laundering, fraudulent financial services, gambling, and so on - simply because it's hosted in a different country.
Not even the US really believes that domestically .. or even when it comes to overseas enforcement, such as sending the FBI to New Zealand to get Kim Dotcom. Or the Pokerstars case.
Not to mention I am really skeptical of the magic invocation of "trade" to overrule national sovereignty. That leads you to stupid places such as Philip Morris trying to use the ISDS process to force Australia to accept an inherently poisonous product (fortunately they eventually lost). https://www.linklaters.com/insights/blogs/arbitrationlinks/2...
You can, of course, pass a law making it illegal for your citizens to communicate with that service, but I think it's really important to understand that that's what's happening. You are passing a law which applies to your citizens and their right to communicate with people in other countries; it's their freedoms you are placing limits on, not the freedoms of the foreign website. Sometimes when you frame things that way, such restrictions stop making sense. (Though perhaps not always.)
This has more or less been the default position of most internet users and developers since the beginning, until fairly recently. I’d even contend that it’s what drew many of us to the internet in the first place. If the internet ever becomes cable TV, fully regulated, controlled, and managed, it will have lost its purpose as a place for free and open exchange of information.
(Zero control is an exaggeration—the worst lawbreakers still face justice under the current system, and that seems ok. I just don’t think we should be tightening the screws any further.)
If you can forget that a position is extreme, doesn't that imply that it's a relatively unoffensive and reasonable position? For actual extreme positions like "reduce housing scarcity by murdering some category of people" or "mitigate climate change by prohibiting human reproduction", does anyone need to be reminded that they're extreme?
> the idea that once something is on the internet, national law simply ceases to apply and governments should have absolutely zero control over obscene material, IP infringment, harassment, libel, foreign propaganda, money laundering, fraudulent financial services, gambling, and so on - simply because it's hosted in a different country.
Is this any different than the premise of sovereignty to begin with?
If you live somewhere gambling is illegal you can get on a flight to Las Vegas. If you want to buy a gun and go to the range to shoot it, or buy a piece of land where you can keep your gun, you can go to Texas, even though there are countries where guns and private land ownership by non-citizens are illegal. If you want to use certain drugs you can go to certain other countries.
Isn't the extreme position that a country should be able to control what you do even when you're willingly choosing to do it in another jurisdiction? Do the people own the government or does the government own the people?
There is a middle way that can kind of muddle along but it can be attacked by both sides for being both to strict and not being strict enough.
People might even have assumed it was sarcastic, and that you didn't actually want site blocking, if you defended it that way.
I think people have forgotten how extreme that position used to be.
(Money laundering and anything involving payment and debts are also independent of site blocking - it's neither sufficient or necessary to block sites to do that.
Isn't that exactly what Cloudflare is, in part? They happily block "malicious" traffic
Moderation is when you block information from me, because I don't want to see that information.
Censorship is when you block information from me, because you don't want me to see that information.
Cloudflare is the former. Or at least, that's what they want to do. Or say that they want to do. If you let someone or something do moderation on your behalf, there's always a good deal of trust involved, that they're not manipulating you by also blocking information you would have wanted to see. Moderation is not a trivial matter. But it's also not censorship.
blocking that interferes with access to legitimate sites that i might use to buy or sell products and communicate with potential customers should be a violation of these agreements.
Some countries simply disconnect themselves from the global internet on occasion to prevent content from being delivered.
Deleted Comment
So by implication you're actually completely fine with other countries pursuing their own objectives for businesses that choose to trade in their country.
Because you cannot, possibly, in 2025, be making an argument that the USA's interpretation of the way of things is unimpeachable. That would be absurd and laughable.
I look forward to you explaining to Germans and Israelis why Nazi symbols and Nazi websites should be legal because banning them hurts a US tech company's interests.
I'm pretty sure you will receive a variety of opinions, some of them in large fonts with an invitation to print them and roll them up for storage.
Deleted Comment
illegal gambling sites in country X must be allowed if they are legal in country Y - Y being America I guess.
>it ends up subsumed by political and corporate interests I believe the term for this is legislated by the laws of particular lands and regions.
Essentially Cloudflare tells U.S Government to set the rules for rest of world please.
Other way around, actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigua#Online_gambling
Deleted Comment
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?
Deleted Comment
...But, of course, US corporations enforcing the same kind of censoring is a-OK, because corporations are people and their censorship is free speech.
I'll be open to your posititon the day Boticelli's Venus doesn't get censored on FB because there's a pair of tits somewhere on the painting.
This is the same as blocking content on your own forum or comment section on your blog. Yes fb is huge, but still just a website, and one with fading popularity.
Blocking ips on a network level is different.
if I was the EU I would have responded to the threats of goods tariffs with a threat of service tariffs that will start off slow and increase every month that tariffs remain in effect
initially 0% tax on Office 365/AWS/facebook+google ad sales, then after a year it's 20%, and so-on
the other side will never push enough at once to make bazooka style retaliation the correct strategy
Most international trade agreements don't cover services in in a comprehensive manner. Because they are so varied and difficult to regulate. E.g. banking, sales, advice, software.
For Cloudflare it's obviously of commerical interest to establish a world wide level playing field.
I don't see it happening. Certainly not because of US trade interests. Because there is a serious lack of good will towards the USA, basically anywhere in the (rest of the) world right now, and services are a much bigger part of the economy than manufacted produce.
The trend I see is to decouple from the US, and China.
I genuinely couldn't reccomend my own country to make a deal with the USA on services. Because we already have a serious issue with the dominance of US cloud tech.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigua#Online_gambling
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body
like, if the direction came down from on high, to copy it ... how few things would have to get flipped on to have roughly the same thing in the united states?
i'd really appreciate an insider's summary. a lot has changed since 2004. probably.
The first part is GFW, with which people outside of China is more familiar. It operates at every international internet cable, analyzing and dynamically blocks traffic in realtime. China only have few sites that connects to international internet, with very limited bandwidth (few Tbps in total), so it's more feasible. But overall speaking, this is the easy part.
The second part of walling a garden is about controlling what's inside the garden. Every website running in China mainland needs an ICP license from the government, which can take weeks. ISPs must be state-owned (there are 4 of them in total, no local small ISPs whatsoever). Residential IPs cannot be used for serving websites because the inbound traffic of well-known ports are blocked, which is required by the law. VPN apps are illegal. etc. These are things that are much harder to do in other countries.
I'd argue it's already been flipped on. Our system just works a little bit differently. Nothing is strictly prohibited via some grand theatrical firewall. Things that are "undesirable" simply meet an information theoretical death sooner than they otherwise should. We've got mountains of tools like DMCA that can precision strike anything naughty while still preserving an illusion of freedom.
Data hoarders are the American version of climbing over the GFW. The strategy of relying on entropy to kill off bad narratives seems to be quite effective. Social media platforms, cloud storage, et. al., are dramatically accelerating this pressure.
A good example is how payment processors (mainly the major credit card companies) police adult sites, forcing them to ban certain keywords. It's a weird situation in which the role of morality police is played at the point where control can naturally be exercised in a capitalist economy.
As we'd expect, that same pattern is repeated elsewhere, e.g. in social networks that censor in all sorts of ways, many of them explicitly intended to reinforce the status quo and neutralize or undermine dissent.
When you have an authoritarian government, all of this tends to happen more centrally. But democracies tend to distribute this function throughout the economy and society.
The Great Firewall is, among various other things, an attempt to create a single historical narrative for the PRC by blocking out reference to things like Tiananmen, discussions of early twentieth-century China suggesting that China could have gone a different way than the Communist Party and prospered, etc. The USA has absolutely nothing like that, people can readily find open-web and social-media content taking every possible position on American history, both staid academic content and wacko conspiracy theory stuff.
When it all comes down to it, the USA just isn’t as hung up on social harmony and narrative control as the PRC. That’s why there isn’t a comparable system in place, and claiming that the odious DMCA is anywhere close, is hyperbole.
If, say, Uruguay doesn't like content on Facebook, they are free to block it. In their opinion, they are protecting their citizens and that's ok. It should not produce legal action that could result in least common denominator style global content censorship.
In an ideal world, there would be no country level blocking but invariably laws will differ.
lol, ok, I'll bite. Other than one side might try to change the rules; why should I believe is free trade is no longer universally good? What is the specific argument?
Because if the argument is that one side might impose taxes, duh? But that's no longer free trade is it?
If both sides were willing to play fair, why wouldn't that be better? And why shouldn't we all be trying to "encourage" everyone to play fair?
Japan closed itself off from the world for centuries during the Edo period. One could say that they suffered economically due to that, but on the other hand, they ended up creating one of the more unique cultures in the world, developing in ways very different from others. It's an interesting kind of diversity.
Why doesn't cloudflare require its more difficult customers to have an ASN - then their reputation and cloudflares can be more easily separated. This wouldn't have to rely on flimsy static IP lists either.
In this case, hitting a massive number of small sites, which aren't engaged in piracy, to protect a few large entities from some other small piracy sites. It's what's happening in both Italy and Spain.
It's funny that as soon as anything European (not even related to EU one bit) is mentioned, people find a way of pinning it on the European Union. The article has literally nothing to do with EU, and everything to do with individual European countries, yet you somehow found a way of blaming EU for it :)
Sincerely, Spanish internet user who gets blocked from half the internet every time a semi-popular football match is played in this country.
If you substitute the GP for 'pretty typical European play' it makes plenty of sense.
Living in the US, I've noticed many Americans don't really make distinctions like that. They see "EU" as a kind of shorthand for "Europe", or something along those lines. Even the fact that the UK is no longer in the EU doesn't affect this - it's still part of what Americans think of as "the EU".
Dead Comment
I assume you must be American. I always find it funny that there is that US belief that Europe is "old-fashioned" with "old tech" and "old progress". I never encountered anyone yet to tell me what progress wasn't in Europe that was in the US.
I actually think this is a bit backward, with US lack of transportation funding, more people struggling with poverty, backward ecological measures, and missing health care with lower life expectancy.
You mean like that nasty EU law called the DMCA?
</s> (just in case)
EU is literally about removing protections for established interests: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e...