You know in your heart of hearts that this is a blatantly intellectually dishonest comparison. Nobody’s buying it, not even yourself.

I'm Italian, and as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist, I find hard to empathize with Cloudflare, especially after this tweet.

First off, the immediate appeal to Vance and Musk is embarrassing. I believe he knows he's technically in the wrong for not abiding to the law, so gathering the sympathy of the "freedom fighters" of the web is all he can do. But the funniest part about this tweet are the "threats" he makes towards Italy.

> In addition, we are considering the following actions: > ... > discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users

He phrases it to be as if the free tier is a favor Cloudflare does to the world, as if it's not obviously a loss-leader designed to get more people into the Cloudflare ecosystem.

> Removing all servers from Italian cities

This is my favorite by far. Does he think that this will start a popular uprising? My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.

In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand. I hope this ends up as being a push for independent European cloud.

If you had access to the twitter feed (and I did at one point, as our company got the firehose from Twitter), it showed the Lat/Long of where it was posted from IIRC.

I still remember looking at that tweet when the helos went in for OBL, from someone in Abottabad PK, saying something like "helicopters hovering at 2AM... this is a rare occurrence" (or something like that).

In the old days 'where it was posted from' used to be displayed on tweets, and Elon intentionally changed it to 'Earth'. Interesting to see a backpedal here, albeit concealed.