Cloudflare is a company that provides a series of services related to the security, performance and availability of websites. Among the most used are those that allow the site’s contents to be distributed through servers located in various parts of the world. Thanks to CDN (Content Delivery Network) Cloudflare you can improve page loading speed and reduce the load on origin servers.
The system of proxying developed by Cloudflare, it allows you to speed up the performance of any website, with the possibility of also optimizing the images and code on the page.
The US company also offers protection from DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service), support for SSL/TLS encryption, an application firewall (WAF) to protect against common computer attacks SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS) and other types of security threats.
Cloudflare is not required to change DNS records
In recent years the popular infrastructure service Cloudflare has been under intense pressure from copyright holders. The company’s services are in fact also used by subjects who publish websites online that distribute content in violation of current regulations for the protection of copyright.
In Europe the Court of Milan ordered Cloudflare to modify its public DNS in order to prevent the domain name resolution used to carry out illegal activities.
The German judges at the Higher Regional Court in Cologne, however, took a different approach. What is the central role of Cloudflare? If the company, even unknowingly, is providing infrastructure services to websites subject to restrictive measures, then it must take action to block their use.
I server DNS of Cloudflare, however, do not play a central role in making the site accessible. There are other DNS providers that do the same. Therefore, as established in Germany, Cloudflare is not obliged to change DNS records at all.
“Il resolver DNS of Cloudflare does not play a ‘central role’ in ensuring that (…) (material protected by copyright, ed.) can be shared freely on the Internet. Using the defendant’s DNS resolver was not necessary to find the IP address via the domain name, nor did it facilitate access“, we read in the text of the sentence.
Cloudflare has instead correctly started showing the HTTP error code 451 (“resource unavailable for legal reasons”) for web pages subject to a judicial order.