Social media platform Twitter/X became accessible to many users in Brazil on Wednesday as an update to its communications network circumvented a block order by the country’s supreme court.
The X update used cloud services offered by third parties, allowing some Brazilian users to take a route outside of the country to reach X, even without a virtual private network, according to Abrint, the Brazilian Association of Internet and Telecommunications Providers.
The number of Brazilians accessing X is unknown, according to Abrint. X did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
“I believe the change was probably intentional. Why would X use a third-party service that ends up being slower than its own?” said Basilio Perez, a board member at Abrint.
The NYT says X is bypassing the block using Cloudflare, but if they block Cloudflare it means they block 24 million sites in Brazil. (I find it strange Cloudflare is jumping into this mess.)
Now, those same regulators are trying to figure out how to fight Mr. Musk’s latest workaround.
Technical experts said it would not be simple. X’s new approach relies on Cloudflare, a major internet-infrastructure provider based in San Francisco, to deliver its site in Brazil. Cloudflare helps route traffic for millions of websites, so blocking it in Brazil would have major consequences for internet users across the nation of 200 million.
Think of it as if X’s car was blocked in Brazil and so it just began using Uber to get around — and now regulators are weighing whether to block Uber for everyone in response.
“You can’t just block Cloudflare because you would block half of the internet,” said Basílio Perez, president of Abrint, the trade group for Brazilian internet providers. He said Cloudflare supported more than 24 million websites, including those of the Brazilian government and banks.
Archived source – https://ghostarchive.org/archive/u7woo
I would assume step 1 is to call out Cloudflare for abetting criminal activity and if they refuse to stop serving Xitter in Brazil, then they too are crassly flouting Brazilian national law and should be banned from the country as well. It would be a brutal showdown, but one would hope that losing ALL OF BRAZIL might hurt the margins enough to make them reconsider.
That’s actually fucking hilarious and I’m sure is a badge of honor for Cloudflare.
It shouldn’t be tho. Cloudflare is a single business and no single business should EVER have that kind of power over a gov’t.
It’s Cloudflare’s hubris showing in a very unstrategic way … and I hope Brazil/America/the world calls them on it.
I don’t like it either but this is Cloudflare working precisely as it’s intended.
