There's no accountability or due process. According to this brilliant law, if some crony with write-privilege adds your website to a list, the whole world has to ban your website within 30 minutes no questions asked.
Judicial oversight took a while in Germany, but it is there now (but I guess you will always find an incompetent judge if you really want). I wonder if cloudflare would implement the German blocklist now that we have judicial oversight. Currently it is as nice registry for pirating sites for anyone using 1.1.1.1 [1]
> To some extent, judges are subordinated to a cabinet minister, and in most instances this is a
minister of justice of either the federation or of one of the states. In Germany, the administration of
justice, including the personnel matters of judges, is viewed as a function of the executive branch of
government, even though it is carried out at the court level by the president of a court, and for the lower
courts, there is an intermediate level of supervision through the president of a higher court. Ultimately,
a cabinet minister is the top of this administrative structure. The supervision of judges includes
appointment, promotion and discipline. Despite this involvement of the executive branch in the
administration of justice, it appears that the independence of the German judiciary in making decisions
from the bench is guaranteed through constitutional principles, statutory remedies, and institutional
traditions that have been observed in the past fifty years. At times, however, the tensions inherent in this
organizational framework become noticeable and allegations of undue executive influence are made.
You're completely on the wrong track here. The discussion is not about who does or doesn't control the courts, it's about the question if someone who's rights have been violated can go to court or not with regard to that specific matter. If a court rules that blocking an IP address is illegal, the access provider has to stop blocking it. Period.
A fine doesn't cause immediate harm as you don't have to immediately pay it while you challenge it in court, having your IP or website blocked happens immediately and will continue harming you until it's decreted that it wasn't lawful.
That depends on the country you are in. In some countries you have to pay anyway and then you get it back if you win the court case. And they're banking on you not challenging the fine because the fees for the court case will exceed the fine so you lose either way.
Challenging the IP bans in Italy is stupidly hard. Your VM gets an IP address that was used a few months ago for soccer piracy? Too bad, you won't be able to access it from Italy.
2. parent comment is wrong, CCUI is requiring court action by their members before they act.
3. I rather have companies competing under market pressure to find solutions to topics like copyright infringement than the German state (once again) creating massive surveillance laws and technical infrastructure for their enforcement in -house.
Read the post, they never blocked the activist. They just changed what they replied to a DNS query of an already blocked site to make it harder to detect.
1. Article you've shared is from 2025-02-26
2. New rules have been in place from 2025-07
3. The author hasn't been blocked at all. You're either a liar or you cannot read.
A group of people who were elected by nobody, should, without any accountability or due process, be able to ban any website they don't like from the internet? And not just for Italians but globally?
Even if you think this is a great thing for Italians (I have no idea why anyone would think that), you expect the whole world to surrender to this absurd demand? Categorical imperative???
Piracy Shield only works within Italy. No provider has ever been expected to take down sites globally in response to a Piracy Shield trigger, or has ever done so.
Also read the start of the comment. See this?
> as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist
Is there really a dearth of maintainers for the originals? They already work fine, no? To me it sounds a bit like: "Addition has become stagnant, so we need to re-implement it in higher category theory. Sure, 99% of even research mathematicians don't benefit from that re-implementation. But no risk no reward! If vocal traditionalists refuse to contribute to reinventing the wheel, maybe they're working on something that hasn't been refined/stagnated decades ago, but I won't take their perspective (that addition already works fine) seriously, unless they start re-implementing addition as well."
"Interim releases will introduce new capabilities from Canonical and upstream open source projects, they serve as a proving ground for these new capabilities." https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle
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