Musk avoided Brazil's X ban by 'coincidence,' Cloudflare CEO states

According to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, Elon Musk's avoidance of Brazil's ban on the platform X occurred by coincidence. This remark highlights the unexpected nature of the situation and raises questions about the broader implications for social media governance and platform operations in various countries. The statement has sparked discussions about the responsibilities of tech leaders in navigating regulatory challenges globally.

Earlier this week, X resumed operations in Brazil, three weeks after the platform was blocked by the country’s Supreme Court. This situation led to Brazil’s top court imposing fines on X Corp., amounting to nearly $1 million for each day the platform remained accessible.

However, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince stated in an interview with TechCrunch that X's return to Brazil was purely coincidental. “I don’t believe there was anything deliberate about this change to circumvent the ban in Brazil,” he explained. “It was simply X transitioning from one IT vendor to another.”

Prince noted that Cloudflare had recently secured a contract to provide X with cloud computing services globally, including in Brazil, after X previously used Fastly, a competitor. This transition altered the IP addresses associated with X, which impacted how Brazilian internet service providers were enforcing the block.

“We’ve never discussed with X how to bypass the Brazilian ban,” Prince stated. “Their recent traffic transition from Fastly to us, especially in Latin America, just happened to coincide with this situation.”

He referred to this as a remarkable coincidence, where his sales team’s deal inadvertently placed them in the middle of a complex geopolitical issue involving Elon Musk. Some may find this hard to believe, considering Musk has previously attempted various methods to evade the ban, including trying to use his Starlink satellites to provide access to X in Brazil before retracting that effort.

A spokesperson for X confirmed that the platform switched network providers after Brazil blocked X, disrupting its infrastructure throughout Latin America. Whether the timing was purely coincidental remains open to interpretation.

Brazilian regulators, however, indicated that Cloudflare has been very cooperative in efforts to re-establish the block on X, as reported by The New York Times.

Brazil enforced the block by requiring internet service providers to restrict access to specific IP addresses. Consequently, when X switched from Fastly to Cloudflare, the block was inadvertently lifted. Prince emphasized that his company was unaware of this potential outcome and expressed doubt that X was intentionally trying to circumvent the ban, criticizing Brazil’s approach as inadequate.

“They implemented the block in a manner that is somewhat makeshift and fragile,” Prince remarked. “It assumes that X will always operate on the same IP address. When it switched to Cloudflare, that changed. If X were indeed trying to evade the ban, they could have easily altered their IP address without involving Cloudflare.”

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Source: techcrunch‍