Regarding "piratebay blocks" and, more generically, DNS censorship: recently, RIPE published [1] usage estimations of 8.8.8.8 by country. It is estimated that 12% of Italian internet users has configured 8.8.8.8 on their machine, which I believe is an astonishing high number!

I work at an Italian ISP and we ran some statistics ourselves and found that percentage to be around 5%, which is lower but still massive. If you consider that the average Internet user doesn't even know what "DNS" is... that means a considerable part of tech-savy users are not using their ISP's DNS (which breaks down many kind of things, among which CDNs).

That's a direct consequence of Government-issued DNS censorship, which all Italian ISP need to obey.

[1] https://labs.ripe.net/Members/gih/measuring-googles-public-d...

> that means a considerable part of tech-savy users are not using their ISP's DNS (which breaks down many kind of things, among which CDNs).

Is every CDN's depended on privileged position inside ISP's? DNS by design is on the edge of the network, and works perfectly fine regardless of who ask the server for a lookup. If the DNS server want to do geo-depended service, they only have to use geo-ip to figure out where a request is coming from and sending the closest geo-located server as answer. You can even do it with http server and redirects.

ISP based dns resolver existed because early networks took time and money to send a single package back and forth from the client to the server. Those economics should not be considered in 2013. Having a third-party doing your dns resolving is like calling the local police office for directions when driving. Antiquated, unnecessary, and not very safe any more for privacy reasons.

DNS requests do not specify who requests the IP address. So think of the problem a CDN has : it has to identify the requesting party's geographical location, based on where the request comes from.

If it comes from 8.8.8.8 then you've got no clue. If it comes from an ISPs recursive DNS you can guess : most ISPs have limited geographical reach. If it comes from Telecom Italia's DNS servers, it's either Italy or the middle east (and due to seabone, you will feed them the same entry point to the CDN)

When a request comes from Google (or for that matter, another global network like Level3) you have a problem. The request doesn't specify where the client is, and the request will be cached. So what do you do ? Which entrypoint do you feed it ? You're essentially stuck with anycast, and that has it's own problems.

You have no clue how Akamai/GoogleGlobalCache work eh? :)

This is a far too simplistic analysis of a multifaceted issue with no single answer. It's the kind of thing I'd expect to hear on Fox.

Yes. I believe it's an artefact of the popularity of the site that that type of comment is becoming more common. We've seen a noticeable increase in trolling and simplistic bias-driven comments over the past year (i.e. comments that suggest that the commenter cannot even conceive why someone might not share their viewpoint).

It's not an analysis, it's a rant, sure. BUT as an Italian, I've seen this over and over and it sickens me.

Italy is one of those very few countries where for years you couldn't legally run an open wifi spot - you had to file ID cards of each and every user, and send them to the police on request. Where the early cypherpunk scene was criminalised and associated with terrorism - the police would just sequester entire servers on a whim, just to collect SSH keys and mailing lists of activists. Where authorities cracked down hard on P2P while at the same time supporting a copyright regime that is much worse than the equivalent US one (the association of publishers and music labels is legally tasked of collecting royalties and copyright-related taxes, with no oversight whatsoever on where the money actually ends up). Where law-mandated DNS blocks were pioneered.

All this in a country with corruption and organised crime at levels unseen elsewhere in Europe, an economy that's been stalling for almost 20 years now, a huge anti-business bureaucracy, and gigantic public debt. It's like, "don't you have anything more urgent to worry about, rather than bothering our Net with laws so inane, even the EU will likely strike them down?"

If this sounds like something out of Fox, I invite you to watch any political talk-show on Italian TV. You think Fox is bad? HA!

The problem at hand is not complicated, but it's something that 1) must be solved at the European level (otherwise, why did we create a unified market?), 2) does not touch real revenues being siphoned to tax havens, which are the real problem -- does Apple sell ads or internet services? not really, but they're THE prime example of this problem, and still won't be touched by this law. It's the usual buffoonery devised by one of the worst political and economic elites in the developed world.

Thanks for detailing this, and I agree

But in Germany, open wifi spots are also a pain. A huge pain

Most places won't bother. However, the problem is not opening it, it's what's done with it and who's responsible if anything is done with it (read, copyright infringement).

They are doing that in most EU countries, not only Italy or the PIGS. I would say the PIGS have a lot of reasons besides maybe this why they are going badly; simple things like being anti-client-friendly as much as possible and finding that normal.

I have a little experience in several EU countries, and if there's any correlation, it's generally in the other direction, with the higher-tax ones generally being better places to do business (I doubt this is a causal relationship, though). The issue with southern Europe is that the government is corrupt, slow, and non-transparent, and regulations are unpredictable and inconsistently enforced.

For example, Denmark's taxes are about 1.5x Greece's (50% of GDP versus 35% of GDP, overall). But Denmark is generally a nicer and easier place to do business. The bureaucracy is large and expensive, but in return for all the money it costs, you get quick, non-corrupt, predictable service. You can register a company in literally hours (online!), for example, while it takes weeks in lower-tax Greece.

Well that last example shows some of the PIGS problems which actually do make it bad business places; the 'mañana‎' thing is deeply ingrained because (I think and hope), before, they didn't really have to care. Although it's been 40-60 years since that was true, it's very much real in all of them. Portugal is moving away from that faster than the others in my experience.