Here, in Spain, internet access is cut off for many websites during football matches because La Liga, the association football league, is in war against cloudflare for not blocking their allegedly offending websites. Or something like that.
Today, I tried to look up a word on a dictionary and I got an error message. “There must be a football game going on right now”. I thought
Or, alternatively, we consider whether doing our communications via the same few huge American corporations is actually a good idea. The internet was literally designed to be resilient to enemy attack and look what we've done to it. Decades later, still on IPv4 and using ridiculous hacks to keep it all just barely working.
If they’re blocking all of Cloudflare I would think they could also be able to block popular VPN gateways. It’s wild that a sports league has power to dictate to ISPs like this.
Why would it? That's a network in space. Could the Spanish league force a US company to block specific satellites covering some part of Spain and some part of not Spain? Seems a stretch.
I imagine that the blocking is semi-voluntary by the local ISPs, not at a transit or peering level.
Anyhow, I flicked through the tables for Starlink's Spain IP address blocks and they directly peer with Cloudflare, so short of Starlink agreeing to perform similar blocking itself or worse yet de peering with Cloudflare, I'd expect availability through them.
Satellite internet isn't a philanthropy project. Whoever's selling it is operating a retail front in the client's country, running payment processing and delivering or shipping physical satellite dishes. Even if the satellite vendor is aligned with your interests (I'm not touching that third-rail topic)—if your government doesn't want you to have satellite internet, you won't have it.
Satellites aren't, in practice and for the time being, a technological end-run around sovereignty and the practical ability of governments to censor internet access.
It's been discussed on HN before, that even first-world democracies, such as the UK [0,1], feel comfortable enacting laws banning satellite internet.
Why do you think it's a stretch? If Starlink wants to legally operate in a country as an ISP then it has to comply with the laws of that country. Just because it's using satellites instead of locally deployed physical infrastructure doesn't absolve it from ISP and general telecomunications regulations of a country.
So if the Spanish government were to make a law saying all ISPs must block the following domains for whatever reason, then Starlink must also comply in that jurisdiction or face fines or get booted out, and I don't know many businesses that take pleasure in being in contempt of the courts.
Out of curiosity, is there anything technical the Spanish authorities could do to block Starlink (i.e jamming)? Or are legal/bureaucratic measures the only solution?
Booted out of the market. Payments, banking, interconnection, contractual agreements.
Businesses exist solely at the pleasure of the state. The state runs the courts; they can invalidate your ability to enforce contracts.
Until and unless they smuggle the dishes into the country like bricks of cocaine and allow subscription payments in bitcoin, local governments can and will regulate Starlink service and users.
Booted out of the country mate. Why are you acting daft? Do you think Starlink could operate in Spain without a regional/EU branch that serves Spanish customers, collects payments, pays Spanish/EU taxes and can be summoned to court if it doesn't follow Spanish laws?
That's why Starlink has geofencing in place so they can ensure it operates only in regions they're legally autorized to, it's not some pirate HAM network that can just freely operate while evading local laws willy nilly.
How many ibuprofen pirates are there in Europe? None, because it's easy enough to get it without a cartel operation.
Making wanted goods and services illegal just hands profits to the black market, it doesn't stop them. If Spain bans the internet there will be pirate ISPs tomorrow.
Not exactly P2P, but I think the fibre optic drones used in Russia/Ukraine could be effective for regaining internet access in Africa.
Those drones have 10km+ fibre optic cables stringing out the back. Fly it to a different country, hook up to a friendly wifi/cellular network, then pipe your general purpose internet traffic through the fibre optic cable.
This wouldn't work everywhere. But for small Africa countries with lots of land borders it might work. Especially if the border area had jungle or other low traffic terrain.
DIY mesh networks (I'm speaking of Wi-Fi, not Meshtastic, but even that has its place), isolated pirateboxes, dead drops, and (horror of horrors) going to the pub and talking to people. It's trivial for a government to make the first one illegal and relatively trivial to enforce it, but difficult in increasing magnitude for them to actually control the remainder.
Have WiFi mesh networks ever been proven to work at scale? The few experiments that I've seen seemed to be slow and unreliable. And in order to be of any real value, at least one of those mesh network nodes needs a connection to the real Internet.
Mesh networks like https://guifi.net have been reliably delivering internet longer than you have been a member of HN.
There are many mesh networks with Autonomous Systems Numbers, peering at internet exchanges, etc. You don't order 10Gbps ports at various IXPs if your community run network can't deliver that bandwidth usefully.
> You don't order 10Gbps ports at various IXPs if your community run network can't deliver that bandwidth usefully.
Well, to be fair....
- Membership of most IXPs is not that expensive and the smaller port sizes are not that expensive
- Many IXPs are moving to 10Gbps as the default port size (e.g. with a membership at LINX in London, you get your first default-size port for free, which is now 10Gbps at LINX).
- If you are running an eyeball network (i.e. xSP, WISP etc.) then you might as well just buy bare-minimum IP transit and save your money for your peering point memberships, since most of your traffic will be going to the CDNs etc. all of whom have open-peering policies at IXPs, so why pay more than you need to ?
- Moving to cynical-view territory, its a marketing expense ... become an IXP member, get a nice logo you can put on your website and give your salesdroids something to name-drop ....
I blocked Africa from my networks a couple weeks ago, and the number of attempts in my logwatch emails has been cut in half ever since. Sometimes even more.
What? They don't block Internet because they want their people united. They do it because they are authoritarians who want to control every aspect of people's lives. India doesn't top the list of countries that cut Internet access because it's a haven of national unity, lol. It's probably a country more divided than any Western ones.
The irony here is the government has little grip in much of central Africa. Militias roam the bush with little fear of law. Places like CAR are nations only because europeans drew it like that on a map. Killing the internet may be the only lever of control for the central government, they cannot control people's lives to nearly the extent is done in most the west.
In places like the US they can just use one of the gazillion laws on the books to charge anyone, then send the police on any corner to get them. There is no need to kill the internet.
We just had that whole Cliven Bundy thing happen a few years ago, no? Also, large swathes of the western US, Alaska, Appalachia, etc., are often difficult for authorities to access (at least quickly).
It's important to be clear that the lack of government control in Central Africa has a lot to do with that same sort of geographic inaccessibility. There are whole countries in Asia that exist largely because of the difficulty of administering rugged frontier; the Amazon still exists largely because the Brazilian/Colombian/etc. governments understandably have trouble administering thousands of square miles of jungle.
Here, in Spain, internet access is cut off for many websites during football matches because La Liga, the association football league, is in war against cloudflare for not blocking their allegedly offending websites. Or something like that.
Today, I tried to look up a word on a dictionary and I got an error message. “There must be a football game going on right now”. I thought
I'm beginning to think Europe needs to just dry out from soccer for a year or two.
Like, we're impacting communications now.
Or, alternatively, we consider whether doing our communications via the same few huge American corporations is actually a good idea. The internet was literally designed to be resilient to enemy attack and look what we've done to it. Decades later, still on IPv4 and using ridiculous hacks to keep it all just barely working.
I know the current situation isn't the most optimal but barely working is an extreme hyperbole.
Truly a case where VPNs do make sense.
If they’re blocking all of Cloudflare I would think they could also be able to block popular VPN gateways. It’s wild that a sports league has power to dictate to ISPs like this.
That sounds insane! Do you have a source?
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43157000
Ah the old misunderstood IP address. It's not a street address guys!
https://torrentfreak.com/laliga-blocks-cloudflare-again-new-...
I have Starlink and it doesn’t seem to be affected in Spain, but I could be wrong. I just haven’t noticed it.
Why would it? That's a network in space. Could the Spanish league force a US company to block specific satellites covering some part of Spain and some part of not Spain? Seems a stretch.
Starlink does come back to earth often in the same country or region as the user. Then it would fall under all the same blocking.
I imagine that the blocking is semi-voluntary by the local ISPs, not at a transit or peering level.
Anyhow, I flicked through the tables for Starlink's Spain IP address blocks and they directly peer with Cloudflare, so short of Starlink agreeing to perform similar blocking itself or worse yet de peering with Cloudflare, I'd expect availability through them.
I think the relevant quote here is, "they can shake their fist at the sky".
Satellite internet isn't a philanthropy project. Whoever's selling it is operating a retail front in the client's country, running payment processing and delivering or shipping physical satellite dishes. Even if the satellite vendor is aligned with your interests (I'm not touching that third-rail topic)—if your government doesn't want you to have satellite internet, you won't have it.
Satellites aren't, in practice and for the time being, a technological end-run around sovereignty and the practical ability of governments to censor internet access.
It's been discussed on HN before, that even first-world democracies, such as the UK [0,1], feel comfortable enacting laws banning satellite internet.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979869 ("Starlink in the Falkland Islands – A national emergency situation? (openfalklands.com)", 225 comments)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645945 ("Saint Helena Island Communications (sainthelenaisland.info)", 145 comments)
Why do you think it's a stretch? If Starlink wants to legally operate in a country as an ISP then it has to comply with the laws of that country. Just because it's using satellites instead of locally deployed physical infrastructure doesn't absolve it from ISP and general telecomunications regulations of a country.
So if the Spanish government were to make a law saying all ISPs must block the following domains for whatever reason, then Starlink must also comply in that jurisdiction or face fines or get booted out, and I don't know many businesses that take pleasure in being in contempt of the courts.
Out of curiosity, is there anything technical the Spanish authorities could do to block Starlink (i.e jamming)? Or are legal/bureaucratic measures the only solution?
Booted out of where, space?
Starlinks isnt a charity, so they collect payments for service and payments are not going through space for sure
Booted out of the market. Payments, banking, interconnection, contractual agreements.
Businesses exist solely at the pleasure of the state. The state runs the courts; they can invalidate your ability to enforce contracts.
Until and unless they smuggle the dishes into the country like bricks of cocaine and allow subscription payments in bitcoin, local governments can and will regulate Starlink service and users.
Booted out of the country mate. Why are you acting daft? Do you think Starlink could operate in Spain without a regional/EU branch that serves Spanish customers, collects payments, pays Spanish/EU taxes and can be summoned to court if it doesn't follow Spanish laws?
That's why Starlink has geofencing in place so they can ensure it operates only in regions they're legally autorized to, it's not some pirate HAM network that can just freely operate while evading local laws willy nilly.
HAM isn't an acronym, FYI.
If you break the internet and summon starlink yes I think pirates will take the void.
How many pirate ISPs exist in EU? How many of them have satellites in orbit?
How many ibuprofen pirates are there in Europe? None, because it's easy enough to get it without a cartel operation.
Making wanted goods and services illegal just hands profits to the black market, it doesn't stop them. If Spain bans the internet there will be pirate ISPs tomorrow.
It could using crypto, but Spain would complain to the USA and they'd back down.
What are the best ways for citizens to get their own p2p internet going?
Not exactly P2P, but I think the fibre optic drones used in Russia/Ukraine could be effective for regaining internet access in Africa.
Those drones have 10km+ fibre optic cables stringing out the back. Fly it to a different country, hook up to a friendly wifi/cellular network, then pipe your general purpose internet traffic through the fibre optic cable.
This wouldn't work everywhere. But for small Africa countries with lots of land borders it might work. Especially if the border area had jungle or other low traffic terrain.
DIY mesh networks (I'm speaking of Wi-Fi, not Meshtastic, but even that has its place), isolated pirateboxes, dead drops, and (horror of horrors) going to the pub and talking to people. It's trivial for a government to make the first one illegal and relatively trivial to enforce it, but difficult in increasing magnitude for them to actually control the remainder.
Have WiFi mesh networks ever been proven to work at scale? The few experiments that I've seen seemed to be slow and unreliable. And in order to be of any real value, at least one of those mesh network nodes needs a connection to the real Internet.
Mesh networks like https://guifi.net have been reliably delivering internet longer than you have been a member of HN.
There are many mesh networks with Autonomous Systems Numbers, peering at internet exchanges, etc. You don't order 10Gbps ports at various IXPs if your community run network can't deliver that bandwidth usefully.
> You don't order 10Gbps ports at various IXPs if your community run network can't deliver that bandwidth usefully.
Well, to be fair....
AM radio?
Even FM walkie talkies as a start.
I blocked Africa from my networks a couple weeks ago, and the number of attempts in my logwatch emails has been cut in half ever since. Sometimes even more.
[dead]
Given how internet exploited and divided people in the west i don't blame them. Ignorance is bliss and i want it back.
What? They don't block Internet because they want their people united. They do it because they are authoritarians who want to control every aspect of people's lives. India doesn't top the list of countries that cut Internet access because it's a haven of national unity, lol. It's probably a country more divided than any Western ones.
The irony here is the government has little grip in much of central Africa. Militias roam the bush with little fear of law. Places like CAR are nations only because europeans drew it like that on a map. Killing the internet may be the only lever of control for the central government, they cannot control people's lives to nearly the extent is done in most the west.
In places like the US they can just use one of the gazillion laws on the books to charge anyone, then send the police on any corner to get them. There is no need to kill the internet.
We just had that whole Cliven Bundy thing happen a few years ago, no? Also, large swathes of the western US, Alaska, Appalachia, etc., are often difficult for authorities to access (at least quickly).
It's important to be clear that the lack of government control in Central Africa has a lot to do with that same sort of geographic inaccessibility. There are whole countries in Asia that exist largely because of the difficulty of administering rugged frontier; the Amazon still exists largely because the Brazilian/Colombian/etc. governments understandably have trouble administering thousands of square miles of jungle.