A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website

by shaunpud- lina.sh

> In Germany, we have the Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (CUII) - literally 'Copyright Clearinghouse for the Internet', a private organization that decides what websites to block, corporate interests rewriting our free internet. No judges, no transparency, just a bunch of ISPs and major copyright holders deciding what your eyes can see.

I'm confused because CUII at:

https://cuii.info/en/about-us/

says (translated):

> The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.

CUII is saying that they enforce court orders. I guess that language doesn't preclude them from also blocking other sites.

the blog post was written before the page was changed

https://web.archive.org/web/20250130115412/https://cuii.info... said

> The Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet (CUII) is an independent body in Germany. It was founded by German internet access providers and copyright holders to objectively examine whether the blocking of access to a given structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany is lawful. When copyright holders submit an application, a review board examines whether the relevant requirements are met. If they are, the review board then recommends a DNS-block of the structurally copyright-infringing website in question. Every recommendation of the review committee must be unanimous and only apply to clear cases of copyright infringement. The recommendation is then forwarded to the German Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railways (Bundesnetzagentur - BNetzA). If the examination by the BNetzA does not reveal any concerns about the DNS-block according to the provisions of the EU Net Neutrality Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2015/2120), the CUII then informs the internet access providers and the applicants accordingly. In such cases, the internet access providers participating in the CUII then block the corresponding domains of the structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany.

related post by the same author, which mentions the current version of the website: https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up

> The CUII now only coordinates blocks between ISPs after a court order. That's it. No more secret votes. No more corporate censorship. The new version of their website says: "The CUII coordinates the conduct of judicial blocking proceedings and the implementation of judicial blocking orders."

I always wonder how 18 year old (author/lina) can have so much knowledge or get involved already into this level.

Is it usually this easy for corporations to get you to believe they are the good guys?

> Is it usually this easy for corporations to get you to believe they are the good guys?

I don't get your point.

What is written on the website of some company/organization/... when writing about itself, is what the respective company/organization/... wants you to believe about it. It should be trivial for you to recognize that what this company/organization/... wants you to believe about it can be very different from what you desire to find as truth about it.

It's like if I wrote: "aleph_minus_one is the greatest human that ever lived on earth." Do you now seriously believe that just because I wrote this about myself, it must be the truth?! :-)

I do not know, I think you are great. Maybe not the greatest, but great nonetheless.

(Disclaimer: I have no idea who you are, but you are great nonetheless!)

i think you are pretty good yourself joohnisgood

Yes. They vote with their (lobby) money almost every day, unless you, who votes with a pencil, every four years.

The blogpost is from February, since then, the CUII switched from arbitrarily decide on blocks through an internal group "until the court order arrives" to strictly include the domains from court orders.

So yes, they USED to just block whenever they wanted, based on "previous similar cases" but without a court order (or a pending one). They then got a lot of flak from the regulatory bodies and switched to actually only include court ordered blocks.

A bit like "There used to be a lot of corruption is politics. There still is, but there also used to be."

The title is misleading. They didn’t block the author’s site’s DNS. They blocked their own site’s DNS to figure out how the author’s site determines their DNS blacklist. Then they changed strategy.

I think the rules change just a few weeks ago so that they now always require court orders. That was not the case before.

Still I would heavily recommend to just use a non-german DNS service.

Note that the CUII blocking process is now based on court orders instead of arbitrary corporate decisions: https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up

> Sadly, there's a small catch: the old blocks stay.

Not true. The article you linked states that the current nefarious block list still exists, it just isn't growing any more.

How can they tell the difference between the CUII giving up and the CUII just saying that they have given up once they successfully found a way to conceal the blocks from the people checking?

There's no need to tell the difference between those, because the CUII has neither given up nor have they said that they have given up. They'll continue to block the kinds of websites they've been blocking and add new ones to the list, and they'll do so under court order, because the kinds of websites they've been blocking are the ones they're legally required to block. They've been accused of overblocking, but only in the weak sense of uselessly blocking domains that had already been taken down by other means. That will continue to happen with the courts in the loop, because there might be a takedown between the submission of evidence and the court order coming into effect.

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Both the submitted article and the above link are from the same blog and author, just five months apart. I was pointing out the newer blog post containing updated information. It also indicates a success of the author’s activism, which is to be welcomed.

Thank you for clarifying.

Doctor have any evidence that the claim is false?

Traditionally in the west, censorship was through copyright rights. It wasn’t considered censorship if you do it for money and business.

Fast forward to today, Americans are pushing you for self censorship through force and denial(if you don’t speak in line with the admin, you will have hard time in your US public sector job or if you want to travel to US) and Europeans find all kind of other ways.

Tough new world order. I used to be advocating for resolution through legal/political means, but now I'm inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control. Nobody wants loose ends. Everyone is terrified of some group of people will do something to them, freedom is out of fashion and those claiming otherwise want freedom for themselves only. The guy who says want to make humans interplanetary species is posing with people detained for traveling on the planet without permission. Just forget about it.

So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.

> I used to be advocating for resolution through legal means, but now I inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control.

I came to a similar conclusion, what happened in the 90s and early 2000s is since the govs had restricted freedom in the physical/real world a lot of young people took refuge in the Internet.

It became harder for an individual to build his own house or start a business, but you could make a website pretty much free from regulations and impediments.

But governments and a lot of interested parties slowly invested the Internet and now we are complaining it sucks. The common Internet and web suck anyway now because it is full of bots, AI generated content, hard to search and you need to prove you are a human every 5 minutes.

We need to create new networks and places just because it is fun and it will take some time for the govs to follow us there: freenet, yggdrasil, alfis, gemini, reticulum, B.A.T.M.A.N, etc.

I'll have to check out gemini again sometime. I tried it out a couple of years ago and really liked how it had that wild west feel of the old-web.

I’m in the U.S. and am not aligned with what’s happening to freedom.

Taking a step back, I support the ideals (the good ones at least) of what I’d perceived that our country was founded on. I also support the individual people in our police and military, but not the fascist orders that they’re having to fulfill. I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general, I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.

This is a predicament, because it’s like you’re driving the bus and a fascist jumps into your lap with a gun to your head and takes the wheel, while he has others put guns to the head of your family and others on the bus. No one asked for this, and I still feel like there are many that believe that there is nothing we can do and that it will take care of itself. But the gerrymandering law that just passed in Texas, on top of everything else that was already in place, is another warning that this won’t go away on its own.

I get what you’re saying about sending people to space, but I think that being able to get off our big rock if we can do so without destroying other life and other places in the universe is worth time and effort. Even natives that lived with the land and life that existed had to move sometimes, life and all that exists physically that has space is to some degree nomadic.

I doubt a lot of the individuals doing these actions, like police or ICE, don’t believe in this. They signed up for these jobs, and votes last year show many of them heartily endorse and believe in these policies.

The national guard, though, probably didn’t sign up to be the backdrop for political ads and a lot of FBI, DEA, etc. agents signed up to work on major crimes rather than busting someone’s landscaper.

Folks doing those duties and jobs should know that these organizations are parts of the executive role and remit of the president. They signed up to do whatever the president orders them to do. Officers have a somewhat different oath, but the chain of command is still abundantly clear to all involved.

> I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.

Check out "Ordinary Men" by Christopher R. Browning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_R._Browning#Ordina...

Also check out this one, written to counter Ordinary Men.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_Willing_Executioner...

It's not well-regarded, but I think that one thing the book tries to bring to light is the context and valence of values of the times, and the political furor of that era which directly contributed to the hatred and violence. I'm not sure that it's fair to say that they were just following orders without looking at the broader social context that people were living in up to the point that those orders were given.

I think that his concept of "eliminationist racism" is somewhat accurate, as I have known race-based supremacists in real life, and have had them protest/counter-protest public events I have been involved with providing security for.

I don't support racial supremacy or hatred in any way, in case that was ambiguous or unclear from context.

>"I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general"

What delectable naivete.

Cops don't become psychopaths rather: Psychopaths become cops.

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I’d caution against taking simplistic views and recommend peaking behind the veil.

Id start by looking into the deportees, people like Abreco Garcia — working men and women who contributed to their society, and all those who received pardons — between rapists, violent criminals, and abusers, you’d have a hard time replacing many of the deportees.

Simplistic views like equating everything you don't like with fascism?

Peeking*

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Interesting point. There’s wide acceptance of commercial censorship, but censorship for the common good (rightfully) feels like a slippery slope. But are they actually so different? Couldn’t the latter be done in a way just as purposeful? Or does it always lead to loss of freedom disproportional to its goals?

I don't think that there's difference, just implementation details differ. Youtube was blocked in Turkey for many years because someone from Germany uploaded defamatory videos about Ataturk(illegal in TR) and it was considered protected speech and Germany & Google refused deleting those. The situation was resolved when someone copyrighted Ataturk in Germany and made Youtube remove these videos.

Besides copyright, especially among Americans, I find that its completely O.K. to censor content it is bad for business. A major one is censorship in order to be advertisement friendly but anything flies, even the guy owns the thing and can do whatever he pleases is good enough for many(slightly controversial).

This is a myth: in Germany, as in many other countries, copyright covers only specific expression; you cannot copyright either the name of a historical person or a topic of discourse. The videos were briefly taken down as an automatic response to a complaint, but it seems the complaint was not upheld and the videos were restored.

At the time, Germany had a law censoring insulting comments about foreign heads of state, but that only applied to living ones (and maybe only those in office at the time?) That law was repealed in 2018.

The videos remained blocked in Turkey, but on account of a specific law banning criticism of Ataturk, not copyright.

Okay, how this changes the core argument? The videos were not taken down briefly because they did not comply with the Turkish law that protects Ataturk from defamation but for the claim that they violated someones commercial interests.

What is censorship for the "common" good? The point being that censorship is a top-down thing; it is not a "common" thing by definition.

Definition of Common good is doing what the political establishment sees as good for preserving their power.

It's not what's good for you, it's what's good for them.

This is some weird revisionism. The definition of a common good is what's good for a community.

What about all the propaganda sites you like?

Would you ban all propaganda? Russian propaganda? Propaganda from countries engaged in illegal wars? How many social media or news sites survive? Heck, how many sites that allow comments and user interaction survive?

Yours is the "think of the children" argument, makes you feel warm and fuzzy when it aligns with your interests but you won't have a leg to stand on by the time it's used against you. Banning is just sweeping some of the trash under the carpet. The ones wielding the ban hammer don't care that most of the trash is still out in the open (social media?), they just need to open the door to arbitrary banning. The ones applauding the ban hammer are lacking the same critical thing that would otherwise handle propaganda and misinformation very well: education.

If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack on a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.

Meanwhile all the RT type crap is flooding social media under thousands of names. But that's fine as long as enough rubes are tricked into thinking banning one site did anything to solve the propaganda issue.

It’s just not as black-and-white as you say. Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom in my country and the EU on a daily basis. Should we invest in education (that is generally already reasonably good, IIUC)? Should we leave it to commercial journalism, even the best of which are moving to clickbait headlines? Should we do nothing?

So then let me ask you, do you feel like arbitrarily banning sites worked? Are we having less of a propaganda and misinformation as we are going ahead with the bans? Because if it's not actually working it sounds a lot like "it's not helping but at least it looks like we're doing something".

The problem is just getting bigger because 1) we aren't actually doing anything else (real) about it and 2) we even actively allow propaganda and misinformation on so many other channels it's laughable.

I said above, the people doing the banning just need a vehicle to carry their interests and justify their banning powers. Since they don't care about the problem itself, they don't care about any of the real measures that could tackle it. They pick the only one which gives them what they really want: power to arbitrarily control information. Russia is a great excuse today (and honestly, almost throughout their history) but it will be used against you tomorrow.

You don't even have to dig too far to see the exact same type of propaganda freely spread on X or Facebook, where the people actually are. RT is happily active there. Far right Musk is there. Can you even pretend that banning the rt.com site in Germany does anything towards the goal of curbing disinformation?

> "Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom"

What's "freedom" mean if not the right to read any publication you want, including (especially!*) media from hostile foreign countries? It's cynical to attack core civil liberties and say that you are doing so in defense of liberty.

*This is the most obvious thing in the world, IMHO, if you look at the general category, and ask yourself what you think about it when the actors are switched around. If China bans its citizens from reading the New York Times (it does), is that a human rights violation—or is it a simple exercise of sovereignty? When North Korea sends people into labor camps for possessing South Korean television shows (it does), is there a colorable case that *their* national security justifies that? Or is that totally out of the question?

One'd have to twist themselves into pretzels to plead exceptionalism for their own country doing anything of this category.

(There's a further subtext that anyone on HN knows how to trivially circumvent such blocks, so, these rules inherently can never apply to HN commenters, ourselves—it's always other people, we'd wish to apply these rules to).

We have to stop rejecting the evidence of our eyes and ears. Propaganda is everywhere. That is a fact. Some of it is destroying the country. That is a fact. We either deal with it or accept the destruction of the country. That is a fact. Your choice is to accept the destruction of the country. That is a fact.

>We either deal with it or accept the destruction of the country. That is a fact.

No, it's a false binary choice presented by you in which the only outcomes are "dealing with it" (severe overreach) or the destruction of the country.

Is your comment propaganda?

> If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack in a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.

> just

So... you do both?

Y'all never made homeless people walk into the tobacco store to get cigs for you when you were kids? Or anyone who would do it for a quick buck.

>door to arbitrary banning

lol the US has had that door removed

We do accept „censorship“ if it follows due process based on clear and well-intended laws. Think taking down piracy sites, child porn, slander.

But CUII is formed by a private oligopoly, with anonymous judges, implementing vague rules, trying to keep secret even what they block. All while limiting what the vast majority of Germans (who don’t know what DNS is) can access on the internet. IMO that’s the issue.

Commercial censorship is worse.

I see no way to have censorship and freedom and common good at the same time, so good of society is out of question - unless you don't value freedom at all.

It is a tool that entrenches current powers that be, system wise. Who decides what the "common" good is? the one in power.

It also hides societal problems and signals that could be used for policymaking.

The acceptance of censorship honestly scares me, and i grew up on stories of oppressive communist regime - full of censorship, secret police etc.

and frankly, commercial censorship might be even worse - it is a "for profit" enterprise, common good be damned.

and one last thing - even if you fully trust your current government, you're just one elections away from something vastly different. They will have access to the same powers that you've granted them(indirectly, by voting).

So you don't believe child porn should be illegal?

Everyone believes in censorship for the common good. People don't agree what should be censored for the common good.

Going straight for the loaded question and making extra assumptions? nice.

the issue with it isn't just in itself, but the fact that there's no way to make it without abuse.

> So you don't believe child porn should be illegal?

The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse strike again!

imho that is just silly ... I can see various ways censorship and freedom and common good at the same time. Actually, I can imagine different set ups where this could work...

But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?

On the other topic, I for one think that censorship of AI generated content and fake news, as well as AI generated ordering of results should be censored. But it's not that easy, and implementing that is an even bigger can of worms.

the issue is how do you prove the content was written by AI?

> But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?

even worse - how do you make sure the definition of such terms stays up to date with changing times?

> So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.

It's tough to imagine what this might look like. I suspect it's too late.

Device attestation is becoming more prevalent, and required for increasingly more functionality. Passkeys are breathing down our necks.

Alternate protocols can only exist if the corporate and governmental powers look the other way. We have Signal and VPNs and BitTorrent and tor, but for how long?

And moreover, does it even matter what protocols we want to use, if most of us use devices that are fully controlled by the tech giants who want to do the censorship?

I don't know if there are particular good ground-level solutions to infrastructure (mesh networks can have their application but are difficult to drive critical mass adoption and every square inch of mesh network has "last mile" problems).

Ideally you would have good government involvement to enforce traffic neutrality, but that's out the door. I'm sure this has been talked to death but ground level P2P infrastructure is what I would be rooting for.

>Traditionally in the west censorship was through copyright rights. It wasn’t considered censorship if you do it for money and business.

To me, those 2 sentences contradict each other. Doing it through copyright rights, and doing it for money and business sound pretty much the same to me. But you're saying that traditionally one wasn't considered censorship, but the other was considered censorship.

They are saying that it is censorship, it just largely wasn't (and isn't) considered such.

Censorship is state/company mandated retraction or blockage of certain information. Copyright is state/company mandated blocking of certain forms of expression.

Copyright permits you to publish any idea you so desire, only that you don't plagiarize someone else while doing so. (Which is always possible, as the fair-use doctrine is a thing)

> Copyright is not censorship.

It may arguably be socially beneficial censorship, but then that's what is claimed by proponents of every basis and means of censorship.

Copyright is definitely not censorship, Copyright is the framework implemented to create intellectual properties to allow for commercial exploitation of text, sound, images and some other intellectual output(details depend on jurisdiction).

Removal of content due to copyrights is censorship, you are being denied to spread or consume certain content. It's not different than defining that some content is protected with "national security" or however else you define it and then prevent the spread and consumption of it. Same thing, different excuse.

You can use placeholders to see it more clearly, i.e. "This content is X therefore in accordance to the law needs to be removed, failure to do so may lead to prosecution and penalties of Y"

You can replace X with anything, including "copyrighted material", "support for Hamas terrorism", "hate speech", "defamation of our glorious leader","communist propaganda", "capitalist propaganda", "self harm".

Is the removal of any content for any reason "censorship"? I don't think that fits conventional usage of the term, and broadening the scope of the word to that level removes much of its usefulness.

If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?

> Is the removal of any content for any reason "censorship"? I don't think that fits conventional usage of the term

I think censorship is generally already considered to be any suppression of speech/communication/information. There are forms of censorship that many consider to be fine/justified, like taking down libel or removing inappropriate language in songs played on the radio, but it'd still conventionally be considered "censored".

The threat of 10 years in prison under the DMCA for providing information that lets people jailbreak/repair/reverse-engineer their own devices definitely fits the bill of censorship to me.

> If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?

If you see some state/company secret that you weren't supposed to, and the government prevents you communicating about it, I'd say that's a form of censorship. I don't think it can be analogized to stealing an object in a meaningful way.

Yes it is censorship. A 3rd party decides what you can consume, the only difference between instances is that you may or may not agree with that.

I don't want to go into the copyright discussion. The only thing I will tell you is this and I won't follow up: Piracy is not theft, it's something else and removal of content to elevate the claimed harm is still censorship. Other censorship types all claim greater good too, the "good guys" in this digital world are not just the copyright lawyers.

I am not saying this from anti-copyright perspective, I'm not anti-copyright although I have issues with it and IMHO needs a reform.

Yes, and yes. Property is theft. Monopoly on objects which have virtually zero cost to be duplicated can't be justified by any moral ground, so it's basically only possible with corrupted mind enforcing this as social policy using psychological manipulation since garden, and every brutal means that can impose them in the obey or suffer dichotomy mindset.

> i don't think that fits conventional usage of the term

Then I think it's on you to provide an alternative definition to the one in the dictionary:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censorship

I'm very curious as to what you think the word means.

Something that annoys me is that OONI (which collects internet censorship data) only considers censorship of things like Twitter, Wikipedia, opposition political parties, Tiananmen Square, etc and Tor. It doesn't consider copyright censorship as censorship.

> freedom is out of fashion and those claiming otherwise want freedom for themselves only.

What a fun way to completely invalidate anyone who doesn't agree with you that "freedom is out of fashion"!

Yes, pre-empt the opposition Rumsfeld style and you ain't gotta worry about anyone taking that position any time soon #chat-with-ai

There is no technological solution. Only a political one. And I tell you already: voting is useless.

> And I tell you already: voting is useless.

If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states had voted last fall, none of the lawlessness that we’ve seen this year would have happened. The people telling you that voting is useless are enjoying the fruits of suckers believing them.

> If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states

The key part being "in a handful of states". There are many states in the country in which your vote is all but meaningless at the federal level. The Electoral College + relentless Gerrymandering that has been done over the past decades ensures that only a small fraction of eligible voters can cast meaningful votes. Makes it much easier to target and propagadandize those smaller groups. We saw it play out with Cambridge Analytica, but there hasn't been another "scandal" of that sort because it's just established practice now. Everyone has their hand in the pot doing the same thing, it's all above belt.

You should still vote, because you can enact change at the local + state levels, but the levers of federal power have been taken from the people.

You appear to be acknowledging that voting does matter, contrary to the previous sweeping claim.

Second, while some states may be unlikely to change their choice of president or senator, the local level matters quite a lot AND that’s where electoral reform will happen. If you don’t like the two party status quo, if you don’t like the electoral college, giving up on voting ensures defeat whereas supporting things like ranked-choice voting or the The National Popular Vote reform.

I kind of agree but think the upshot is exactly the reverse. First, swing states do matter as you acknowledge, which has exactly the opposite implication. Second, yes, by all means let's move beyond the Electoral college. There are organizations working to get a majority to sign the popular vote interstate compact. Check if your state is signed on and if not, I promise there's an org working on it that needs your help.

See? Same facts, but culminating in a call to action based on the premise that is affirmative of the value of democracy. If there was one person who mobilized this way for every ten who gave up in resignation it would be done already. But the battle against hedonic skepticism is hard.

> voting is useless

That also happens to be what the people in power would like you to believe.

How can you say that. Look at Trump.

I think this "derelicta" is actually advocating for Trumps position here so I bet "derelicta" has already had a look at Trump lol

I am not. I just don't see a difference between Trump and Biden. Or Merz and Scholz. Or Lepen and Macron. All these people serve Capital, and you'd be very wrong to believe I stand with capitalists.

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Calling someone who buys a platform and amplifies nazis, white nationalists and groups while sequestering marginalized groups of people free speech is basically 1984 double speak.

Calling people from other countries "savages from primitive cultures" is textbook hardcore racism.

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Would be very interested in hearing what's your definition of racism.

These two comments are basically verbatim textbook lines from what white supremacists say as well as people who champion separating races and encourage racially segregated states.

So, hardcore misoginy from Japan, among lolicon it's fine to you. And children marriage in the US, no issues with that, neither.

What does the political situation in America have to do with the topic of German Internet censorship?

The current US administration even called out the EU countries for excessive censorship so they have nothing to do with this.

Why can't people stay on topic without bringing Trump in the discussion every 5 minutes?

More censorship is a good inventive to build really uncensorable protocols that ISPs can't mess with.

These protocols or revisions already exist - DNSSEC at the site level and DoT/DoH at the user level prevent this kind of malicious tampering with responses by the ISP.

The issue is that they're not commonly used, and even if that changes, the ISPs can roll out harder-to-bypass censorship methods like SNI inspection or IP blocks.

And webmasters can, in turn, ramp up the adoption of QUIC, ECH, IPv6, or bury their frontend in some CDN that you can't feasibly "IP ban" without massive collateral damage.

You can't win the war against corporate censorship and malicious anti-freedom politicians through purely technical means. But you can sure make it much harder for them.

> you can't feasibly "IP ban" without massive collateral damage.

Oh but they can, we are suffering this in Spain every weekend the football league plays.

Tons of Cloudflare IPs sent to a blackhole regardless of how many other non relevant websites are behind.

They block them during games only? Lmao thats some insane lobbying

Imagine if the radios we all carry with us everywhere could be programmed to communicate with each other.

(I'm not sure why I replied here. I guess I'm saying that establishing some kind of mesh network protocol between all cellphones would be a great addition to those other protocols you mentioned.)

Cellular modems are typically locked down completely to shit. But I know of a few LTE chips that can be obtained with no pre-burned vendor boot keys, and also have the vendor modem sources and toolchains leaked.

These don’t prevent censorship necessarily, they will give you a way to detect it at best.

DNSSEC gives you the ability to verify the DNS response. It doesn’t protect against a straight up packet sniffer or ISP tampering, it just allows you to detect that it has happened.

DoT/DoH are better, they will guarantee you receive the response the resolver wanted you to. And this will prevent ISP-level blocks. But the government can just pressure public resolvers to enact the changes at the public resolver level (as they are now doing in certain European countries).

You can use your own recursive, and this will actually circumvent most censorship (but not hijacking).

Hijacking is actually quite rare. ISPs are usually implementing the blocks at their resolver (or the government is mandating that public resolvers do). To actually block things more predictably, SNI is already very prevalent and generally a better ROI (because you need to have a packet sniffer to do either).

DNSSEC itself won't help you alone, but the combination of DNSSEC + ODoH/DoT will. Without DNSSEC, your (O)DoH/DoT server can mess with the DNS results as much as your ISP could.

Of course you will need to configure your DNS server/client to do local validation for this, and at most it'll prevent you from falling for scams or other domain foolery.

In practice, DNSSEC won't do anything for ordinary Internet users, because it runs between recursive resolvers and authority servers, and ordinary users run neither: they use stub resolvers (essentially, "gethostbyname") --- which is why you DHCP-configure a DNS server when you connect to a network. If you were running a recursive resolver, your DNS server would just be "127.0.0.1".

The parent comment is also correct that the best DNSSEC can do for you, in the case where you're not relying on an upstream DNS server for resolution (in which case your ISP can invisibly defeat DNSSEC) is to tell you that a name has been censored.

And, of course, only a tiny fraction of zones on the Internet are signed, and most of them are irrelevant; the signature rate in the Tranco Top 1000 (which includes most popular names in European areas where DNSSEC is enabled by default and security-theatrically keyed by registrars) is below 10%.

DNS-over-HTTPS, on the other hand, does decisively solve this problem --- it allows you to delegate requests to an off-network resolver your ISP doesn't control, and, unlike with DNSSEC, the channel between you and that resolver is end-to-end secure. It also doesn't require anybody to sign their zone, and has never blown up and taken a huge popular site off the Internet for hours at a time, like DNSSEC has.

Whatever else DNSSEC is, it isn't really a solution for the censorship problem.

SNI blocking will hopefully be harder now that Let's Encrypt is rolling out IP certificates, so ECH becomes viable for websites that don't share an IP address with known-good websites (like Cloudflare tunnels). IP blocks will be the only solution on the normal web.

For everything else, there's I2P and Tor.

Ultimately it all ends on the physical layer. Those who control the physical layer can always suppress communication if they choose so. The only protocol ISP can't mess with is having an army big enough (and somehow the commanders of that army has to be motivated not to mess with the protocol for their own purposes).

No, more censorship is a reason to vote better governments not to find workaround while accepting tyranny.

It's great to have alternatives but in practice those don't really get adoption (until a catastrophe has already happened) and during regular times their usage tends to put a target on your back.

The protocols already exist. Deploy an I2P router for an effective darknet on the internet, or set up Yggdrasil for a next-generation decentralized & private internet alternative.

An even easier start, just set up unfiltered encrypted DNS on your devices. E.g. Njalla DNS or Mullvad DNS. Or get a good VPN such as Mullvad.

At the same time, keep voting for privacy. And send letters to your politicians!

The workarounds on this page mostly suggest to use large public resolvers. Feature request (not sure if the author is on HN): it would be interesting to know which domains are blocked by 9.9.9.9, 1.1.1.1, and especially the new DNS4EU service.

Thanks so much for this. I never heard about DNS4EU before.

https://www.joindns4.eu/about

"Supported by the European Commission" is a massive red flag.

It isn't.

Few years ago I would have been happy about such a service in EU level. Now I just fear how they are planning to misuse it.

Sadly dns4eu does not support dnscrypt protocol which is deal-breaker in 2025 if you ask me.

Why isn't DoT sufficient?

I am not an expert but I read this website [1] and got impression that dns-over-tls is first iteration of encrypted dns and dnscrpyt protocol is second iteration of encrypted dns fixing its problems. Also dns-over-tls is not supported by package dnscrypt-proxy2 on openwrt and I have personal bias for not configuring dns-over-https on routers (in my opinion https is too complex protocol and have risk of getting hacked). Maybe I am alone with my opinions - I do not know. I wanted to use dns4eu and got really disappointed with not supporting dnscrypt. That's all.

[1] https://dnscrypt.info/faq

One problem I've run into with that approach is that Akamai uses DNS for steering you to the correct portion of its CDN and the default servers you get from public DNS have abysmal peering with my ISP. So simply switching the default DNS in my router isn't enough, I'd actually have to run my own custom DNS resolver in order to special case Akamai there.

9.9.9.9 provides a first-party tool to test domains against their block list

https://quad9.net/result/

and there is also 9.9.9.10, which does not perform any blocking (if it does, then no one has noticed that, which is unlikely)

Tangent: does anybody know which DNS server software that providers like dns4eu and nextdns use ?

Are they using nsd or bind or … did they write their own?

DNS4EU is using the Knot resolver

These stories and the stories about going after people who are torrenting in much more aggressive manner make my puzzle by Proton decision to relocate to Germany from Switzerland over some proposed law. I understand that it would make it harder to operate with protecting privacy but I would wonder why relocating to Germany, what would the Swiss government do that would be worse than the current situation in Germany?

I did not go though the details of the proposed Swiss law to be honest so it might be obvious why they are doing that but still why Germany instead of some other place (like Mullvad being in Sweden) ?

I am Swiss, but haven't looked into this in detail. My understanding is that the new law basically would require logging user data, with a six-month retention. While this isn't great, the EU is continually pressing for backdoors in encryption. That's far worse.

Hence, I think Proton's move is really about reducing costs, with the potential Swiss law as an excuse.

> Hence, I think Proton's move is really about reducing costs, with the potential Swiss law as an excuse.

And it sounds like blackmail: "if you don't do what we ask, we leave the country". Seems like more and more companies are doing that. Interesting to use blackmail while defending freedom, if you ask me.

When domains are seized, does the new "owner" pay the registration renewals? If so, what's to stop someone from doing this:

- create a vanity TLD with high renewal fees

- register a bunch of sites that are mirrors of already seized domains

- mention them in enough places they get noticed

- ???

- profit

These domains aren't being seized, they are being blocked. In this case, as per TFA, they're just overriding the domain nameserver at the ISP default DNS server.

Even if they were actually seized, do you think if the police seize a rental car they'll be paying the rental fee until they give it back?

Seizing a domain probably costs way more in procedures than any renewal fees.

Also, blocking websites typically doesn't involve ICANN, the infringing website still owns the domain. They just order ISPs in the country to lie on some DNS queries, which is the reason why such blocks are so easy to work around.

I don't think governments seizing domains are paying anything.

Step 1 there is a bit of a "draw the rest of the owl"

So this entire censorship scheme is bypassed by using 8.8.8.8 or the like?

What about simply running ‘unbound’ yourself?

What do you mean? Where would unbound forward requests to?

It would ask a root nameserver for an ip address for the .com nameserver, and then ask the .com nameserver for the ip address of the example.com nameserver, then ask the example.com nameserver for further records (and may continue to recurse).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server

Unbound is a recursive, caching, validating name server. Personally, I run it on a container right on my Mikrotik router. I service DNS myself, and honestly it feels better. If you’re unaware of what this software can do, I do suggest looking into it a bit.

Ah telefonica… that’s Spanish, same company that every weekend blocks cloudfare in order to “avoid” football piracy. They don’t believe in laws, well they believe that laws are for the plebs not for them, the elites

It seems like more and more ISPs are doing that: https://koreanrandom.com/forum/topic/85072-modxvm-problem-in...

They also mention Movistar, O2, and Vodafone. A systematic violation of the internet's integrity, carried out on the scale of an entire so-called "free" EU(!) country. It's a disaster.

It’s most, yes. Due to a court order. But Telefonica are the ones who owns the domestic broadcasting soccer rights this season and past.

Not just Telefónica. Yesterday was a Saturday so I couldn't access a crapton of websites from any of 3 different ISPs. It's getting really old at this point.

> Yesterday was a Saturday so I couldn't access a crapton of websites from any of 3 different ISPs

Wait, is that why yesterday internet was so janky? Encountered multiple websites that seemed offline when visited from my home (Spain) Vodafone connection, but all my remote servers could still access them. In my decade+ of living here, never heard of them doing a "Ah today it's Saturday, lets block Cloudflare" thing until this very moment. Have any resources (Spanish or English) where I can read more about this? Fucking ridiculous if this is true.

Yup. Been going on for a few months already. Here are some links:

https://www.eleconomista.es/tecnologia/noticias/13287968/03/...

https://vercel.com/blog/update-on-spain-and-laliga-blocks-of...

https://tebas.tv/

I understand it's just rhetorics, but I am amused by the idea of some ISP managers considering themselves "the elites".

> the idea of some ISP managers considering themselves "the elites".

Can you lock millions of users out of Internet? If that's not elite in 2025, who is?

They are. Spanish organizations , the c-suite is always there by nepotism

You can say "the elites" in Telefonica case, because is heavily under the Spanish socialist party control.

Pedro Sanchez forced a public investment (€1134 billion) into that company using the SEPI so he can control Telefonica. Then he changed Telefonica president with a socialist pawn, inserted many socialist "elite" into the company, and as a cherry on top, he embedded Huawei inside Telefonica core systems.

Adding Source.

Spain concludes purchase of 10% stake in Telefonica https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/spain-concludes-purcha...

Lol at Tebas and LaLiga, so "socialists"...

Listen, kids, the higher you get into politics, the faster the textbooks (Marx, Smith, and antything in between) get tossed out of a window and drugs, prostitutes and hard power it's what matters.

Better if you don't know how actual politics work, because it that would be pure Realpolitiks. Imagine an 1984 and a Brave New World merded and psychos on top keeping the illusion because of raw power. You have that today.

The closest against to that would be the EFF, Richard Stallman, and hardcore groups and humanists working maybe for pride, but helping the rest of the society as the main social law (Golden Rule).

But we are not ready. We have a 'hardware' from Neolitics and a 'software' from the Space Era... no wonder the are wars and hardcore collisions between ideologies...

So basically, we need a new way of contact DoH multiple DNS's for a probabilistic response for a site. Ideally, you could also verify geographically different ASNs, including opposing countries to get around legal idiocy.

Even better, do this resolution over Tor.

Doing that would bypass any state level stupidity, inflicted by an oligopoly, state actors, or similar.

I cannot stress that enough: do not use your ISP provided DNS.

What options are there? Do we have a reliable distributed DNS? I'm genuinely asking, because I've just realized that for the past 7 years I've been happily using my provider's DNS server and never thought of it.

But now, I'm seriously considering something better than that.

Just checked the list of blocked domains, and my very first try if I can open it, I got also a censorship website from the spanish government (I'm in spain, provider is DIGI) for fitgirl-repacks.site - other (mostly german) piracy sites from the list open fine.

Spain here too, Vodafone, and fitgirl-repacks.site also displays "ESTÁ USTED INTENTANDO ACCEDER A UN SITIO WEB ILEGAL" if I accept the (obviously) mismatched certificate they're using.

Surprisingly, thepiratebay.org is available for me though without issues. My previous ISPs here (Movistar, Orange, Jazztel) were all blocking thepiratebay.org

Seems to be pretty hit/miss what exact domains various ISPs block here. I would have imagined the police/courts serve like a centralized .txt file (simplified) the ISPs just fetch once a day or whatever, but seems to be way less organized than that, for better or worse.

just set my DNS to 1.1.1.1 and am no longer bothered with that censorship.

But now you are telling CloudFlare about every domain you visit.

You are right. Found out there is also DNS4EU with a bit more privacy-friendly orientation. How much they log, well, unless they get audited, I won't know.

Simply use https://quad9.net/ 9.9.9.9 instead.

Initially, this will be used exactly as intended and therefore seen as good. After about ~10 years it will include other "objectionable" material and a good case will be made for it so most people will not necessarily realize it.

What about this:

“Your internet provider can’t block or throttle websites. The open web stays open.” Open Internet (Net Neutrality) Regulation (EU) 2015/2120 Official text on EUR-Lex

well, there will always be conflicting laws, and it is exactly the job of the courts to figure out which law ranks higher.

In Germany the citizens must change their DNS to block the German government control of their lives. Too many bad laws to keep giving them your consent to be governed.

> In Germany the citizens must change their DNS to block the German government control of their lives.

It's not the government directly, but what is called in German "Flucht ins Privatrecht" [escape into private law], meaning that the government "outsources" such activities to private organizations that are only very indirectly charged by the government (implying that you cannot use public law to sue the government, but you have to sue the respective organization indirectly. Also, since the relationship between the government and the respective organization is very indirect, the politicians can claim that they are not responsible for the organization's wrongdoings - something that is often not easy to disproof).

It’s explicitly not the government, it’s an independent private association of ISPs and copyright holders.

The blocks wouldn't exist without the government.

From https://cuii.info/en/about-us/

The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.

The article was about how they are deciding to block websites on their own authority, without court orders.

The article is speculating on why a test domain owned by Telefonica is blocked. The government issues many blocking orders and the CUII complies.

Germany is so backward in stuff like this, skilled engineers should just move to the free world and leave them with their insolvent pensions.

Define free world.

That's already happening

Where is the free world? Certainly not the US with Trump around.

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The legal basis is explained here [0] . Funny thing is that in contrast to what the OP says the German net agency says that the CUII needs a court decision:

>A rights holder represented in the CUII can find copyright infringements and then file a lawsuit with the court for the implementation of a DNS block. If the court decides that a DNS block is lawful, this block is implemented by the Internet access providers organized in the CUII. The prerequisites for a blocking claim against the Internet access provider pursuant to § 8 DDG are met, - if a rights holder can prove his copyright, - his works are published on the Internet without his consent, - he has no other way of remedying the infringement, - if the blocking is reasonable and proportionate.

[0] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Digitales/Sch...

Since July that is, OP posts about it as well. This post is from February.

Great to hear! OP probably had some part in that. Just read the blog post [0]

[0] https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up

Unlike censorship on US-owned social media platforms where the female nipple is banned for some reason.

I don't care much for US puritanism but if the only choices are banning nipples or banning dissenting political views then it's clear which is more dangerous for a free society.

I'd go further and say that Germany is not part of the (general) internet. From the top of my head I can list 5-10 domains that are blocked. No site explaining, just "this site can't be reached". Reasons are piracy, pornography, politics. And the biggest problem is that it's being widely defended with many voices to increase that censorship.

I've never ran into a DNS blocked domain, so I am really curious which 10 domains from the top of your head are blocked on the DNS level, specifically in Germany?

I'm not sure if porn or piracy links would fly here. But as others suggested, rt.com is blocked. And I know at least one other political one

I am not interested in the piracy and porn ones, as blocking piracy and porn is hardly a German thing ...

rt.com is banned within the EU (and YouTube), not just Germany. It's literally a propaganda outlet of the Russian government, hardly banned lightly, or merely because of dissenting political opinions. Unsurprisingly, Moscow took that ban quite personal. Russia apologists are literally sitting in the German parliament right now. So much for censoring opposing political opinions.

Bit of a reach claiming Germany isn't part of the general internet isn't it?

> bigger than one would think

Why in heaven's name would anyone think that censorship is NOT super heavy-handed in Germany?

Does Germany have a recent or historical track record of EVER being a liberal-minded place?

Yes, it absolutely does.

For understandable reasons, censorship in particular of Holocaust and Nazi-related imagery is especially heavy-handed in Germany. Among other things, this has led to bans of several video games (note how much space is dedicated to Germany on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_by_...) that were relatively popular and uncontroversial in North America, particularly ones with an eye to historic simulation. The context of depicting the Nazis as unquestionably the bad guys who you as a player character must vanquish, does not matter to the censors.

> For understandable reasons

There is no such thing as "understandable" when it comes to censorship, especially when it comes to Nazi imagery, and especially in Germany.

If there's actually one place where it needs to be remembered, it's absolutely there.

I think the main problem is that Germany does not have a constitutional equivalent to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Instead, each federal state and the federal government have fragmented information access laws, often with broad exemptions for official secrecy.

In many cases, even investigative journalists cannot obtain details about governance processes and decisions made behind closed doors. The government often cites strict data protection rules and uses them as a shield against disclosure.

Another example: In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement. If someone feels they have been treated "unfairly", good luck to prove that in court when two officers present a completely different version of events, especially since body cameras are very rare in germany.

> I think the main problem is that Germany does not have a constitutional equivalent to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Instead, each federal state and the federal government have fragmented information access laws, often with broad exemptions for official secrecy.

At first sight, I don't see how the FOIA is much different to the Informationsfreiheitsgesetz (freedom of information law). https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informationsfreiheitsgesetz

Isn't the FOIA also applied on the federal level?

> In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement

I think this is misleading. It's not especially prohibited. Generally, law enforcement enjoys the same rights as everyone else, that is having a right to privacy and the confidentiality of the spoken, non-public word. You can't film law enforcement folks preemptively, or without cause, if they have the reasonable expectation of confidentiality of the spoken word. If law enforcement is breaking the law, you are allowed to collect video evidence. In any case, you are not allowed to publish non-public video recordings or pictures of anyone, taken without explicit, or implicit consent. Public or non-public here means the implied confidentiality of communication, not necessarily where it happened. Eg. talking on a public street doesn't make every conversation public.

Mind you, in Germany, illegally obtained evidence isn't as easily dismissed as it is in the US. If you record the police without cause (illegally) and they happen to commit a crime, your recording isn't tainted evidence as far as I know, but rather you may (if indicted) face legal consequences yourself, independently. Again, publication is a completely different matter.

Legality of video recordings is pretty much irrelevant, regarding the legal power dynamics you described, as the police could just confiscate your phone and find some excuse for destroying the evidence. Independent oversight seems more important to address this.

On the other hand, I do think law enforcement should enjoy privacy, generally, as everyone else. I don't think, having a camera in your face with every interaction is helpful for anyone, all things considered, but would rather aid escalation and discourage leniency. Constant video surveillance just sucks, no matter who is doing the recording.

You think that law enforcement should enjoy privacy in the course of their duty and in public, so I guess you are against body cameras then.

Also you say that my information about filming law enforcement is misleading, but then you make a legal analysis and conclude that even when you consider all these facts, you can still be charged for illegally obtained evidence. For me, what you describe is very much the same as it is not allowed to film law enforcement by de facto.

> You think that law enforcement should enjoy privacy in the course of their duty and in public

Yes, law enforcement officers should be allowed to have e.g. confidential conversations with each other. Just like you do (or should have) chatting with your work colleagues.

> so I guess you are against body cameras then.

I am conflicted, because I don't want to be filmed during police interactions, either. It really depends on the legal setup. If they are mandatory, encrypted, only readable with a court orders, always on, not fed into the general surveillance stream (AI shit, face recognition), reliable and tamper proof, I am in favor of them, I guess. That is, if they are useful to hold officers accountable, as well. Pretty utopic, tho.

However, regarding the officers privacy they are fundamentally different than a right to film law enforcement without cause, in any "public" situation.

> For me, what you describe is very much the same as it is not allowed to film law enforcement by de facto.

Yes, but not because they are law enforcement. You can also be charged for illegally filming anyone else.

Eg. dash cams as used around the world are also not legal in Germany. They have to be constructed to loop a short time interval and only retain the recording in case of an accident. You can't continuously record traffic or public life in Germany.

Personally, I think it's quite awesome you got legal leverage against someone filming, or surveilling you against your will.

Time to break out the 20 Germany bad demographic maps that dovetail-overlay with East Germany and Afd. Or the fire set by Russian agents that destroyed 1,400 Vietnamese owned businesses in Poland. Were those suppressed in Germany?

Except in the case of rt.com it's completely justified

Let us all cry rivers for rt.com

I live in Germany. I just opened it and it loaded just fine.

Once again someone spreading Russian FUD.

Just tested, and it's blocked on Deutsche Telekom & O2 mobile.

At least mobile telekom and my local landline ISP resolve it fine.

Are you using a third-party DNS like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8?

It's been well documented that some ISPs are blocking it: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperrungen_von_Internetinhalte...

FWIW I was also sceptical, but just tried it from my phone network and it seems indeed blocked. Wouldn't be the first case of different ISPs using different block-lists. c.f. bs.to

No problem from Telekom mobile and residential the biggest provider by a humongous margin.

That is not true

Maybe you should actually investigate the matter instead of spreading FUD yourself.

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Not parent but I'm skeptical because normalizing blocking is a very real slippery slope. Last night I debugged an issue with one of my apps for 1h, it turned out one of the Cloudflare IPs my device got were legally blocked in Spain. Not even ISP DNS, but the IP. And this is because of some CF customer hosting a football (soccer) streaming site. This is the new normal, in a democratic country. What the post is talking about in Germany seems similar. And these are democratic countries with many constitutional freedoms. This is not a hypothetical, but happening today. ID verification is already implemented in the UK. Chat control is possibly next.

So let me flip the question: if a certain thing is illegal in a jurisdiction, but hosted outside, is it justified to block access to the hosting provider (notably, including Cloudflare and other giants)?

I would. Appetite for censorship should be measured against something I find unpalatable. When one starts down the road of making decisions for others - it is only a question of time before someone does the same for you with possibly a different perspective. The moment one finds themselves outside the groupthink on spaces vs tabs, I'd like that bar to be as far away as possible.

> The moment one finds themselves outside the groupthink

The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do). The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe.

If there's nothing wrong with what is being said, then why should it matter who says it? Does propaganda somehow gain effectiveness because it comes "from the source"?

> The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe.

And ... ?

Right, but as long as you wage genocide against non-Europeans then Europe will not only support you, but will go after the people protesting it. That's the morals of European leaders today.

So why haven't we banned Israeli news sites and companies for their war/genocide in Gaza?

i would like to remind you that Germany was one of the biggest recipients of russian gas in Europe, and worked actively to keep it flowing despite the war, and didn't try to break away from their dependence for a very long time.

It's pure hypocrisy coupled with conformity - or rather virtue signalling. Send junk weapons to Ukraine to showcase that you do support the cause, meanwhile keep buying gas the same time go after their propaganda because that looks nice.

There is a difference I think between unpalatable content (that you disagree with, that you find incorrect, and so on) and content generated with the specific purpose of deceiving the reader.

I used to be a hardline freedom of information defender, but we must face the fact that humanity has become way too good at manufactoring opinions and even facts. We're exposed to this threat at all levels, from your local company invading your feed with hidden ads in legitimate tiktok content to nation states influencing your political worldview.

Considering yourself immune to this manipulation is as naive as thinking you don't need vaccines - depressingly, we've far beyond the point where individual protection is enough.

>I would. Appetite for censorship should be measured against something I find unpalatable.

In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished.

Now imagine you have a Ruzzian TV station publishing hard core porn for children to see, how to you punsish them without paid trolls claiming censorship ? Because this si what happens, in Romania Romanian TV station need to respect the Romanian laws , liek for example pay fines and retract any falsehoods and mistakes, but Ruzzians can publish fake documents and videos and if we want them to respect the laws of our countries we it is censorship... blocking faked documents is bad, blocking boobs is good in the land of the free

> In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished

rt hasn't done this and there are concrete laws against doing this, if rt violated them, they would/should fined/suspended, it's really that simple, do you have any real examples of illegal things they've carried out?

and if you're implying that extrajudicial measures are the only effective method to deal w/ situations like these, then there's an issue w/ the laws

just because censorship is carried out against a cause you don't like, doesn't make it justified, since it's very likely to be used in less benevolent ways in the future

I don’t think your porn comparison works because normally what happens is governments set rules about what content can be shown at what times. In the UK, we call it the “watershed”.

Setting limits on what content can be shown at what times isn’t censorship because you’re not actually censoring content. What you’re doing is setting rules about scheduling content.

Clear case of "motive justifies the means". I think in a free democracy, no one should block any propaganda, as it the responsibility of the individual to asses what to read and what not. In a democracy, it is more dangerous to censor and justify the means with motive - this opens the door to unjust censorship.

The best counter-argument I can provide to your wonderful ideal is that people are stupid, and they are vulnerable to being manipulated into believing dangerous peace-disrupting falsehoods by propaganda.

Spinning your thoughts further, you assume that stupidity is not some kind of freedom that you get to enjoy in a democracy. The opposite is true, people are free to be stupid, and if the majority is stupid, the smart people have to give in to the fact that stupid people make the rules (by voting).

The whole idea of supressing stupidity in a democracy leads to some sort of elitist society.

If the people are too stupid to discern propaganda from truth, then they are too stupid to vote.

What if at the end of the day, that propaganda does work and leaving it unopposed is as much a danger to democracy as censorship? It seems like a scenario where you have to pick your poison now, the last 100 years have shown populations can be manipulated.

Democracy is sneaky refined domination, subtle enough that masses do not see through it, but it is elites controlling the masses.

At the end, this political system is about supporting current power who settled by force (and to whom you have to pay a tax to not be sent into physical jail, and all your belongings taken).

Remember that at the beginning, these nice people are actually people who killed to be in place, and collected a lot of power and money, and that are now defending their position.

Kingdoms, then Dictatorship were too unstable, and this gave birth to Democracy, still with the same elites.

In some way, it is a softer continuation of conquest-coercion dressed as consent.

The newest generations use propaganda to settle; the approach changes, but the goal is ultimately the same.

> Clear case of "motive justifies the means".

Except, in the case of RT, it was not justified in an abstract way at all. Consistently "reporting" on stories counter-indicated by all available evidence.

To put it another way, if a judge can imprison a murderer for life as justified by the motive of reducing murders, what's stopping them from imprisoning everyone with no justification at all? Well, in practice the evidence required is quite a hurdle to this.

If you're not arguing that RT is innocent of what it has been accused, then you're arguing against the concept of punitive action outright.

It used to be common sense among non-authoritarians, that propaganda just becomes more potent from suppression.

Plenty of people have never seen moon hoax theorists' propaganda. They imagine if they see it, they'll quickly see through it for its absurdity. But they're often wrong. Moon hoax theorist's propaganda is actually much better than you think. They can point out lots of "inconsistencies", which do have an explanation, but aren't immediately obvious at all. You see they have experience meeting people like you, but you don't have experience meeting people like them.

I used moon hoaxers as an example because their sophisticated propaganda actually have been exposed and explained a few times, although it still isn't common knowledge why e.g. it seems the exact same rock is right behind an astronaut in two different photos. But that isn't nearly as true for suppressed ideologies. You haven't heard their arguments.

> Consistently "reporting" on stories counter-indicated by all available evidence.... If you're not arguing that RT is innocent of what it has been accused

Can you give a concrete example? (Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered, in years of people denigrating RT on the Internet.)

It's true, Russia could be said to engage in full-blown hybrid warfare according to some definitions. I don't want to downplay what they do at all.

But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.

> But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.

Just because two things superficially share some traits doesn't mean they are equivalent, at all. "Full-blown warfare against their own populations" is a bit dramatic, don't you think? As a German, I can tell you, while the government doesn't much act to my benefit, I am not exactly at war with them either. Intelligence, military and police don't have the competence or power, either. Most importantly, like in many proper democracies, there is a plurality of opinions and oversight in parliament, which prevents this sort of thing at scale. "Full-blown warfare" would imply a grand conspiracy, that's simply not factual.

Apart from the UK, Hungary and Poland, I think that's true for most western countries. The US is a bit exceptional, of course, since... well, I don't know what the fuck they are smoking there.

I didn't get the impression they were making any value judgement

You’re right. I guess I am. I’m pretty happy RT is blocked.

Why?

[Editing this while I still can as although I think it's a reasonable discussion I tend to regret getting too much into politics here.]

Surely it will stop at blocking them (the Bad Guys), it will never extend to blocking us (the Good Guys). What a naive way of thinking.

Which German laws did RT break?

Propaganda usually isn't banned, except in specific cases (defamation, hate speech, etc...). But AFAIK, RT is not special in that regard, it is just the kind of content one would expect from a website openly affiliated with Russian authorities.

Pretty sure the biggest propaganda channel is social media and it's wide open.

I would be in favor of limiting these channels, because I agree with you it seems necessary. But it’s also something to be quite careful with, I feel.

I think the current shift in acceptance of blocking social media for children is a start and allows us to consider it’s positive and negative effects.

You see, he isn't against propaganda, he is against propaganda he doesn't agree with.

I’m against propaganda that seeks to actively undermine freedom and democracy in my country and the rest of the EU. Is that so strange?

No, it's not. Social media is massively censored in many EU countries (and UK).

Not OP, but there is strong censorship. The previous government sent a police brigade to a random dud that said something like “he is a clown” or similar (don’t remember the details). In Germany you have to be extremely careful with what you say, and how you say it, because you can be in jail faster than you think.

There are people who see that as positive, because are used to be extremely careful and conscious of their words. But is a very thin line, where one word can obliterate your life as you know it.

Please post a source

Here one: translation you can do at leisure. Also there is a sister comment with a similar case. I have a family memver that was also persecuted for hanging a flag saying “the park is for the children “ as they wanted to construct in a park.

There are literally thousands of cases constantly of different severity, but freedom looks different to me. https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/habeck-beleidigu...

In 2021, Andreas Grote, the minister of interior of the Germany city-state Hamburg was called a dick in a tweet. (Andy, you are such a dick). This led to a police search of the home of the Twitter account owner [1].

This sparked a discussion about how to handle hate spech, as for regular people being called a dick does not result in a 06:00 am. police raid with six officers.

In the aftermath, a mural in a left wing culture center has been painted over multiple times with the tweet and a call for his resignation [1].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-g...

[1] https://archive.is/hETjp

[2] https://images.welt.de/67dd7b08559c903aae8287ac/12efd9779a84...

In an ideal society there would be no need to block propaganda.

Still concerning that there is a Ministry of Truth.

The good solution would be the educate the population about critical thinking, and to use their brain when they see information.

If you just censor things, you hide the real problems, and end up with dumb people without critical judgment (or no access to information).

They do educate people to do that already. But the power of narrative is much stronger than the motivation to do the actual work of checking your sources.

It’s very easy to convince anyone to support your cause. Just tell them they are the real victims, that they have been deprived of their rightful privilege, and that it is someone else’s fault. Give them undue credit, take away their inconvenient responsibilities. I promise you, they will have zero motivation to uncover your lies.

We have a collective responsibility to protect the truth - the actual, messy, complicated, real-life truth.

Exactly. That isn't going to help the argument whatsoever. Blocking stuff without legal basis is an entirely different ballpark from legally mandated blocks after due process and the option for legal challenges.

It’s a cycle.

The Russian propaganda spends a lot of resources on reinforcing high-minded ideals that provide a scaffolding for the intellectual types to climb on. The suckers and idiots fall for the more odious stuff.

Is Chris Hedges a Russian propagandist?

That is a retarded justification.

It’s incredibly valuable to understand how the enemy thinks.

> Are you seriously crying about the biggest Russian propaganda channel being blocked

The decision to classify something as propaganda should never be the role of a government, much less blocking it.

But that's something that's close to impossible for continental European cultures to ever understand, at a gut level.

Interesting...so facts are just whatever comes pre-approved by your worldview? Handy system!

Yes?

I must ask sincerely: do you know of concrete instances where RT has been shown to claim things that are objectively untrue, that they reasonably ought to have known were untrue? Or is this just about them using the same techniques (selective reporting / emphasis on stories salient to particular worldviews, editorialization etc.) that everyone else uses?

For that matter, in most cases where RT has been linked to me, I couldn't see any clear way that the story advanced Russian interests, except perhaps by trying to paint the USA as full of internal social and cultural conflicts. But, frankly, American media does a pretty good job of that, too. (And many of those media outlets have also grossly misrepresented many events relevant to those conflicts — including ones where I know very well that they were misrepresented because I witnessed them first-hand. For example, I watched the Rittenhouse trial live-streamed, and then read media coverage describing something barely recognizable as what I just saw.)

(Besides, it's not like they're trying to hide that "rt" stands for Russia Today.)

Who cares. Just make it go away, there's too much noise already. I for one don't care about the arguments of some "news outlet" paid for by the ones who attacked Ukraine. The Global Times isn't banned because the CCP is outlining issues using restraint.

Can't take the "propaganda" and "misinformation" excuses seriously when the German establishment media has been blatantly lying to their teeth about an ongoing genocide, and smearing anyone who stood for an obvious moral cause with 0 repercussion. They make the Israeli far-right newspapers blush.

[flagged]

They ran a TV channel without broadcasting license. Which country allows this?

At least we can say fuck on TV and aren’t afraid of showing a naked female breast.

But when you call a politician "Schwachkopf" your house gets raided. I guess you have to take the bad with the good.

The raid was because of allegedly antisemitic post, but they totally botched the warrant. The mentioned antisemitism in the title but not in the reasons.

And it happened in Bavaria, not the biggest fans of the Green party, so it‘s a little bit strange that the state attorney went with a raid.

Or "so 1 Pimmel" ("such 1 penis")

I assume you mean to contrast with the US. Things are not as you stereotype them. Re profanity, cases such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_v._Fox_Television_Stations... are instructive. Re nudity, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State... (which also has more information on the aforementioned case):

> In 1964, The Pawnbroker, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Rod Steiger, was initially rejected because of two scenes in which the actresses Linda Geiser and Thelma Oliver fully expose their breasts; and a sex scene between Oliver and Jaime Sánchez, which it described as "unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful." ... On a 6–3 vote, the MPAA granted the film an "exception" conditional on "reduction in the length of the scenes which the Production Code Administration found unapprovable." The exception to the code was granted as a "special and unique case", and was described by The New York Times at the time as "an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent."[63] The requested reductions of nudity were minimal, and the outcome was viewed in the media as a victory for the film's producers.[62] The Pawnbroker was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval. ...

>political (like rt.com)

Honestly, wartime foreign media blocking is the only justified censorship type IMHO. Even then I would say that should be accessible with a delay. Why? Because media is is part of the tools in the war, up until the last day before the invasion Moscow officials on Twitter were mocking USA and other western leaders warning that Russia has troops build up and the invasion was imminent. The traditional Russian media was also writing articles about this. This was putting political pressure on the Western leaders, portraying them as warmongers reducing their credibility etc. Then suddenly one night Putin had 55min speech on why it was the West was the actual invaders and started the invasion. To this day, the Russian propaganda holds strong and awful lot of people are convinced that it is Russia who is facing invasion and is fighting bravely against the aggressors. Including the US administration since a few months.

On the other hand, complete permanent blocking also undermines populations assessment of the reality. As it turned out, the West wasn't also entirely truthful on the progress of the war and the effectiveness of the sanctions.

I don't know maybe we should have safeguards instead of censorship.

As we all experienced, there is always somebody that wants to "protect" us: and so often is the state