In his ongoing fight with the Brazilian authorities, score one for Elon Musk — at least for now.
On Tuesday, 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.
The president of Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, confirmed X’s maneuver and said his agency was evaluating how to block the platform again.
The new twist showed how Mr. 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 Mr. 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 trying to figure out how to fight Mr. Musk’s latest workaround.
Technical experts said it would not be simple. 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.
He said that figuring out a new way to block X in Brazil would be highly complicated and would take days, if not longer. “It’s very difficult, but it’s possible,” he said. “But it would involve other types of blockages that aren’t occurring today.”
Thiago Ayub, technology director for Sage Networks, a telecom company that helped Brazilian internet providers block X last month, was more skeptical.
“In technology, almost anything is possible, but there is also the issue of time and budget,” he said. “If we take a team of IT geniuses from Brazil, give them an unlimited budget and ask them to create a solution, it may be possible, but it also may be prohibitive.”
Mr. Ayub spoke from a conference attended by many internet providers, where there was already a heated debate on Wednesday over what to do next. “There is no consensus,” he said. “I understand that the legal departments of the providers are struggling to decide.”
Mr. Perez, whose members deliver internet connections to more than half of Brazil, said that internet providers were awaiting instructions from Brazilian regulators on what to do next.
X and Brazil’s Supreme Court did not respond to requests for comment.
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 most likely eventually be able to figure out how to block X again.
It was unclear how many Brazilians could use X again on 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.
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