The math Italy just handed Netflix is terrifying for every subscription company on Earth.
5.4 million Italian subscribers. Up to €500 per Premium user, €250 per Standard user. Netflix launched in Italy at €11.99/month in 2015 and hiked four times to €19.99 by 2024. The court said every single increase was illegal because the contract never stated a justified reason for any of them.
The total refund exposure is somewhere in the hundreds of millions of euros. For a single country with ~2% of Netflix's 325 million global subscribers.
Here's what nobody is pricing in: Germany and Spain have already filed identical challenges using the same EU Directive from 1993. Berlin and Cologne courts already ruled that generic price-change clauses are void. Italy just gave every consumer group in Europe a finished legal template.
Netflix hiked prices globally on March 26. Six days later, this ruling dropped. The company is now simultaneously raising prices worldwide while a court in its fourth-largest European market ordered it to roll prices back to 2015 levels.
The real exposure here isn't Italy. Netflix can absorb hundreds of millions. The real exposure is the legal principle: telling customers "we're raising your price, you can cancel if you don't like it" is not consent under EU law. That logic applies to every subscription service operating in Europe. Every SaaS company. Every streaming platform. Every telecom.
The freedom to cancel is not the freedom to agree. That one sentence just repriced the entire European subscription economy.
The math Italy just handed Netflix is terrifying for every subscription company on Earth.
5.4 million Italian subscribers. Up to €500 per Premium user, €250 per Standard user. Netflix launched in Italy at €11.99/month in 2015 and hiked four times to €19.99 by 2024. The court said every single increase was illegal because the contract never stated a justified reason for any of them.
The total refund exposure is somewhere in the hundreds of millions of euros. For a single country with ~2% of Netflix's 325 million global subscribers.
Here's what nobody is pricing in: Germany and Spain have already filed identical challenges using the same EU Directive from 1993. Berlin and Cologne courts already ruled that generic price-change clauses are void. Italy just gave every consumer group in Europe a finished legal template.
Netflix hiked prices globally on March 26. Six days later, this ruling dropped. The company is now simultaneously raising prices worldwide while a court in its fourth-largest European market ordered it to roll prices back to 2015 levels.
The real exposure here isn't Italy. Netflix can absorb hundreds of millions. The real exposure is the legal principle: telling customers "we're raising your price, you can cancel if you don't like it" is not consent under EU law. That logic applies to every subscription service operating in Europe. Every SaaS company. Every streaming platform. Every telecom.
The freedom to cancel is not the freedom to agree. That one sentence just repriced the entire European subscription economy.
The Nuances of Iranian Asymmetric Warfare on Land, Sea, and Air
Its biggest challenge remains detecting these operations in time without relying on medium- and long-range radars. That is the real limitation of Iran’s current asymmetric air warfare tactic.
We often struggle to understand asymmetric warfare. The common idea of war is simple: you hit the enemy with everything you have, as efficiently as possible, aiming for a quick victory.
That is the concept of conventional war, which gives superpowers and large, modern armies a massive advantage, because a direct, short-term clash tends to devastate a smaller force.
Asymmetric warfare works differently. It is based on lure, lure, and lure again, and only then ambush. The goal is not a quick victory, but to wear down the adversary through attrition, targeting economic, political, and psychological pressure much more than pure military destruction.
In Iran’s case, its resilience and missile-based attrition strategy clearly aim to erode domestic support for the U.S. government, increase pressure on Gulf and Asian allies, and generate political and economic stress in Europe, including through inflation.
All of this is executed through tactical means that serve multiple strategic axes, all converging to create an environment of stress and chaos for Trump.
This entire approach operates under well-defined doctrines of asymmetric warfare at sea, on land, and in the air.
When we see the U.S. Navy stationed 700 km off the Iranian coast, many people ask: “Where are Iran’s anti-ship missiles?”
Anxious American politicians even claim that “everything is under control” and that the ships can safely advance.
Can Iran attack those ships? Yes, it can. But it chooses not to, at least not yet.
Those ships, operating at 700 km, are already at the limit of the F-18’s combat radius, the main aircraft on American carriers. And they are obviously well within Iranian missile range.
During the conflict with the Houthis, the Yemenis launched Sayyad/Quds-Z0 missiles with an 800 km range. Today, they already speak of Palestine-2 and Quds-4 versions that easily exceed 1,000 km.
If the Houthi arsenal is essentially Iranian technology, what is the real range of Iran’s anti-ship missiles today? It certainly goes well beyond 700 km.
But asymmetric warfare is not a 50-meter sprint. It is a carefully planned marathon. The Iranians know that the critical point is maintaining control over the Strait of Hormuz. That’s why they try to lure the ships closer, a bait the U.S. Navy has so far refused to take.
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... You don't bomb a university when you're winning a war, you bomb a university when you've realized the real threat was never the arsenal it was the intelligence behind it and you have no idea how to stop it.
a nuclear scientist just got killed in an airstrike in Iran and honestly i need to talk about this because western media won't & i think most people don't understand what they're looking at
as i've been explaining for weeks now in multiple threads, Israel through Mossad has been assassinating Iranian scientists for over a decade and i genuinely think the Fakhrizadeh case is one of the most terrifying operations in modern intelligence history
this man was killed in 2020 by a remote controlled ai-powered machine gun smuggled into Iran in pieces over several months, the whole thing weighed a ton, it was mounted on a pickup truck on the side of the road and operated via satellite from a Mossad command center 1 600 km away, 15 bullets fired in under 60 seconds, the AI compensated for the satellite delay the recoil and the speed of the car in real time, that's how far they're willing to go to eliminate Iranian brainpower one by one
but here's what i find fascinating, the assassinations didn't break the ecosystem because it runs too deep, so they escalated, US just bombed Iran's university of science and technology, one of the oldest and most prestigious in the country and if you've been following me you already know why this matters
these are the same institutions that took Iran from 58th to 4th in the world in nanotechnology in 20y that produce the engineers who designed the Arvand rocket engine and the maneuverable reentry vehicles, that trained the physicists behind the MRBM to IRBM leap to 4 000 km on Diego Garcia, i've been writing about this scientific ecosystem for years and everything happening right now is the logical continuation of what i already laid out
and i think that's the part nobody wants to say out loud, this war was never about nukes or regime change, i believe it's about dismantling the only sovereign state in the Middle East and i mean the ONLY ONE
look at every other country in the region, Saudi Arabia outsources its entire defense to the Pentagon & couldn't fight a war in Yemen for 8y without American logistics and still lost, the UAE bought F-35s in exchange for normalizing with Israel, Qatar hosts the largest US air base in the region at Al Udeid, Bahrain hosts the US Fifth fleet, Kuwait, Iraq Jordan are military protectorates in everything but name none of these countries design manufacture or deploy their own weapons systems, none of them have an indigenous defense industry, their sovereignty ends where the next Lockheed Martin contract begins, if Washington calls tomorrow and says stop they stop because they literally cannot function without american hardware
Iran is the ONLY country in that entire region that built everything from scratch under 40y of total embargo because NOBODY would sell them anything and that's exactly why they're the target
they know the only way to stop this machine is to kill the people who build it…and when killing them one by one wasn't enough to crack an ecosystem too deep to break, they started bombing the universities directly and i'll say this as clearly as i can
you don't bomb a university when you're winning a war, you bomb a university when you've realized the real threat was never the arsenal it was the intelligence behind it and you have no idea how to stop it
I don't think people understand the gravity of the situation as the UN is preparing for possible nuclear weapon use in Iran.
This is a picture of Tehran. For you uneducated, untraveled, never-served, warhawks licking your chops at the thought of bombing it. It's not some low population desert. There are families, children, family pets. Regular working class people with dreams. You're sick to want war.
Tehran is a city of nearly 10,000,000 people. Imagine nuking Washington, Berlin, Paris, London, or beyond, bombed with nuclear weapons.
I gave up my diplomatic career to leak this information. I suspended my duties so as not to be part of or a witness to this crime against humanity, in an attempt to prevent a nuclear winter before it is too late.
Yesterday, nearly ten million people protested “No Kings” in the United States. The possibility of the use of nuclear weapons must be taken very seriously. It's dangerous. Act now. Spread this message worldwide. Take the streets. Protest for our humanity and future. Only the people can stop it. History will remember us.
Houthis
I don’t think it will be long before the Houthis announce the closure of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
For an operation of this scale, they must have been planning it over the last few weeks, stockpiling anti-ship missiles, anti-aircraft systems, and various types of drones.
It’s not just about closing the strait, but about being able to sustain that blockade against a naval task force that will certainly be deployed in response.
As we had already predicted, missile launches from Iran haven’t stopped, and those from Yemen are unlikely to stop if a blockade is put in place.
With two major straits closed, the war would escalate dramatically. This also raises questions about why Iran hasn’t closed the Bab el-Mandeb until now.
Iran’s war strategy seems to follow several distinct stages.
The first was to suppress fire from American bases in the Gulf countries and launch counterstrikes against Israel.
The second focused on targeting radars, creating a missile corridor to Israel and toward a Saudi air base, while a counter-drone operation was launched to reduce surveillance over the territory.
The third stage, it seems to me, focuses heavily on the economic aspect, further suffocating the Gulf countries by targeting their financial and corporate systems, which Iran views as U.S. partners in attacks against its territory.
In this regard, only Saudi Arabia is currently exporting through the Red Sea around 50-60% of its oil capacity. In a scenario where much of Iran’s objective already seems fulfilled, this puts the Gulf countries in a position to put intense pressure on Trump to force an end to the war.
However, the fact that Saudi Arabia is still exporting through the Red Sea lessens the Iranian pressure on oil prices. It is therefore very likely that the Houthis will step in shortly.
Iran’s war should still enter a new phase of targeting key industries in other countries in the region, and by all indications, this conflict is far from over.
Beyond what the US and Israel are doing, I don’t expect any major innovations.
The idea of putting boots on the ground in Iran seems insane to me, but in this war, I no longer doubt anything.
I think we’re losing our sense of reality. I’ve never seen anyone sell out their country so publicly. This doesn't apply just to Iran, but to any country.
A leader needs to have at least a minimum level of decency and respect for the people they claim to represent.
L'homme fort de l'#Iran a une licence d'informatique et de mathématiques
Et un doctorat de philosophie occidentale
Nous on a Attal qui n'a jamais fini scpo et a obtenu un passe-droit, Lecornu qui a menti sur ses diplômes et un Bardella qui n'a même pas validé une licence de geo
As I reported yesterday, if the current Iranian missile attack tempo is maintained, coalition defensive interceptor stocks will only last another 4-5 days.
Even shipments from Japan, which also manufactures PAC-3 MSE interceptors, and diversions from European systems would only provide a few additional days of coverage.
This exact same measure has already been repeated multiple times to replenish Ukrainian stocks, and production/reallocation rates simply cannot keep pace with sustained high-volume consumption.
Systems like THAAD and Arrow have no meaningful near-term replenishment pipeline, but remain vital for increasing interception probabilities against Iranian hypersonic and heavy ballistic missiles, particularly the more challenging ones such as the Fattah, Emad, Shahab-3, Sejjil and Kheibar.
The coalition continues to conduct heavy bombardment strikes on Iran throughout this afternoon, but the persistent concern over dwindling defensive munitions stocks remains critical and unresolved.
French colonisation of Algeria was incomprehensibly violent. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide", described the French colonisation of Algeria as genocidal. It was truly heinous, nightmarish stuff, from the homeland of liberalism itself. https://t.co/Z8QpAcRTMO
Hello world, would anyone know where I can watch the movie #Fanon ?
Quelqu’un sait où je peux regarder #Fanon, le film ?
Il n’est disponible nul part au Canada
Merci 🙏
"We will not bend the knee to those who say a Palestinian or a Lebanese life is somehow less worthy, or less equal, to an Israeli or American life."
My speech at the @DAWNmenaorg dinner in DC, accepting their annual Integrity award.
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