A sign against Brazil’s Supreme Court decision to ban X, during Independence Day protests in São Paulo, on Sept 7, 2024. Musk’s social media platform used a technical manoeuvre to restore service for many Brazilians after a court blocked it. — The New York Times
RIO DE JANEIRO: In his continuing fight with the Brazilian authorities, score one for Elon Musk – at least briefly.
On Sept 18, his social network, X, suddenly went live again for many across Brazil after three weeks of being blocked under orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court.
The reason? X made a technical change to how it routes its Internet traffic, enabling the site to evade the digital roadblocks set up in recent weeks by Brazilian Internet providers.
But by Wednesday night, the president of Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, said his agency believed it would soon be able to restore the block.
The new twist showed how Musk appears far from backing down in Brazil, making the dispute a significant test of strength between national sovereignty and the borderless power of Internet companies.
Brazil’s Supreme Court blocked X because the company defied orders to remove certain accounts and then closed its offices in the country to avoid consequences.
Days later, a separate company controlled by Musk, the satellite-Internet provider Starlink, told Brazilian regulators it would continue to deliver X directly to Brazilians from satellites in space. Starlink later backed down after regulators made clear the company would lose its license in Brazil.
Now, those same regulators are working to quickly reverse Musk’s latest workaround.
Earlier Wednesday, technical experts predicted doing so would be hard. X’s new approach relies on Cloudflare, a major Internet-infrastructure provider based in San Francisco, to deliver its site in Brazil. Cloudflare helps route traffic for millions of websites, so blocking it in Brazil would have major consequences for Internet users across the nation of 200 million.
Think of it as if X’s car was blocked in Brazil, and so it just began using Uber to get around – and now regulators are weighing whether to block Uber for everyone in response.
“You can’t just block Cloudflare, because you would block half of the Internet,” said Basílio Perez, president of Abrint, the trade group for Brazilian Internet providers. He said Cloudflare supported more than 24 million websites, including those of the Brazilian government and banks.
But hours later, Anatel’s president, Carlos Baigorri, said in an interview that Cloudflare had agreed to isolate Internet traffic from X, enabling Brazilian Internet providers to easily target and block that traffic.
“Cloudflare has been extremely cooperative,” he said. “It really shows the diverse reactions from two companies, Cloudflare and X.”
Abrint, whose members deliver Internet connections to more than half of Brazil, said that Internet providers received a new order from Anatel, the nation’s telecommunications regulator, late Wednesday with technical instructions on how to block traffic from X. The order instructed the companies to comply starting Thursday, the trade group said.
X said in a statement that it moved traffic to Cloudflare because its recent tumult in Brazil had affected its Internet infrastructure in Latin America.
“This change resulted in an inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users,” the company said in a statement. “While we expect the platform to be inaccessible again in Brazil soon, we continue efforts to work with the Brazilian government to return very soon for the people of Brazil.”
The relatively pacific comment was a notable departure from the months of harsh criticism that X’s owner, Musk, has leveled against Brazil’s Supreme Court. For weeks, it appeared that neither side was willing to budge in the dispute, suggesting that X could remain blocked in Brazil for the long term. In recent interviews, three Brazilian Supreme Court justices said that it was up to X to comply with court orders if it wanted to return to the country.
Brazil’s Supreme Court did not respond to requests for comment on X’s latest move Wednesday.
Earlier Wednesday, a person close to Cloudflare confirmed that X had recently switched to using the company’s services but said that it was not actively trying to help X evade the block in Brazil. The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss business with a client, suggested that regulators would soon be able to figure out how to block X again.
It was unclear how many Brazilians could use X again Wednesday, but thousands were flocking to the site to celebrate its return. Reports of X’s status were mixed, depending on the Internet provider and device.
At The New York Times bureau in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday, the X app was functioning, but the website was not.
Baigorri, Brazil’s telecom regulator, said that even after X is blocked again in Brazil, he expected Musk to seek new ways around the suspension. “This is going to be a cat-and-mouse game,” he said. – The New York Times
