In the past, Cloudflare were free speech absolutists. They accepted customers in a content neutral way. When people tried to get them to deplatform ISIS websites, they said this:
One of the greatest strengths of the United States is a belief that speech, particularly political speech, is sacred. A website, of course, is nothing but speech... A website is speech. It is not a bomb. There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.
When people started asking why Cloudflare hosts racist and neo-nazi content, they eventually relented from their free speech position and stopped hosting one called The Daily Stormer. The CEO wrote a big blog post about how what he was doing is bad for the internet and free speech but he's going to do it anyways (I'm paraphrasing, read original words here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/). Since then, they've stopped working with a number of other sites due to content, like 8chan.
I think it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of situation for Cloudflare. They weren't really looking for political battles, but ended up having them anyways. I think this Wired article adds some interesting perspective: https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/
> When people started asking why Cloudflare hosts racist and neo-nazi content, they eventually relented from their free speech position and stopped hosting one called The Daily Stormer.
That's not entirely accurate (though I could understand how it seems that way). From the article:
"The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology."
So the issue wasn't what CF was hosting for DS. Rather, it was DS speaking on behalf of CF. In some ways, that's like taking away ones first amendment rights: I have the right to speak for myself, you don't have the right to speak for me.
While it's nuanced, I feel it's fair. And while I'm not some big defender of CF, I feel in this case, they handled it without compromising their 1st Amendment ideals.
I think if your business helps 20,000,000 groups of people talk to each other (sites), you get to once or twice be like, "Ok, you guys are clearly murderers plotting murders, can you go do it somewhere else?" Haha.
I think this goes out the window when you have a bad actor making claims as follows:
>The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
I am no fan of Cloudflare; as an expat, their service just makes my life increasingly frustrating as I have to go through hoops and perform circus tricks just to look at the bouquet selection selection of a local florist if I want to send flowers to my Mom on Mothers' Day, never mind having the audacity to look at local news sites.
That being said, I get their position if places like Daily Stormer were making invalid claims of support/association with the company. I'd cut them off too without a moments hesitation, since Cloudflare's model is anything but implicit support of the sites it hosts/protects.
I don't see a good-faith effort from Daily Stormer in that post, I see an attempt to use a good-faith effort from CloudFlate to legitimize a bad-faith effort from Daily Stormer; and this is not okay. This is not a free-speech issue from my perspective, and instead, it's a bad-actor continuing to act in bad-faith in response to the good-will offered by Cloudflare.
Again, I do feel Cloudflare nowadays is trash -- I am a US expat and I just close the tab when I hit the Cloudflare redirect or Google Captcha on absolutely senseless pages. (Neverminding my frustration with US corporations blocking me completely, as if the sweet sweet deals at Home Depot or Target are too good for my current country of residence...)
But, that is a separate issue of individuals accessing standard HTTP(s) pages in an expected way versus a rogue group claiming implicit support from Cloudflare to their cause. I totally get Cloudflare's response in the latter.
Cloudflare only got its revenge on Daily Stormer because it had the power to do so, and abused that power instead of using the legal system like everyone else has to.
I used to be a schoolteacher, and no matter what bad or false thing a student said about me, I wouldn't fail them as retribution or to prove them wrong or anything. That would be abuse of power.
These are not analogous. You have a moral (and possibly a legal) obligation to grade a student fairly. Unless you are a school administrator, you can not unilaterally expel a student.
A business has no such constraints. If I go to a bar and start telling people that the owner is actually a racist, I’m going to get kicked out even if I want to buy more drinks. That’s not “might is right”; it’s the owner not wanting to do business with an asshole.
I'm talking about morals, not the law. The issue is that there was an imbalance of power which means one party can push the other one around but not the reverse.
If The Daily Stormer had made that claim about some unrelated business, it wouldn't suffer any such consequences because that other business wouldn't have any power over it. If only powerful players can punish weak players and people call that "fair", then that's kind of the definition of "might is right".
The bar analogy isn't quite the same because there are many other bars so the kicked out customer doesn't suffer much loss. If it's the only bar in town and people really need that service, then it would be morally wrong for the owner to use his power to settle personal disputes. Everybody would be living in fear of being banned and would conform their behavior to his demands. That's why monopolies are often regulated to prevent such abuses of power.
> If The Daily Stormer had made that claim about some unrelated business, it wouldn't suffer any such consequences because that other business wouldn't have any power over it.
Even if cloudflare was equally sized, they probably would have shut down services over that. Don't misrepresent your business partners if you want them to stay business partners.
> If it's the only bar in town and people really need that service
It's not the only DDoS protection, and most sites don't need significant DDoS protection.
I don't think there is any moral conflict in believing that the government shouldn't regulate speech while also not helping people whose speech you disagree with. "Let me help you hand out copies of your newsletter" does not follow from "I don't think you should go to prison for writing that newsletter".
> >The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
This was not true as far as I know at least. I heard that some random dude in their forum made the claim.
The old joke about there being only three numbers in computer science comes to mind. First they blocked none (zero) on the basis of the content, then a site was blocked (one), and now ... well, two isn't "many," but it won't be the last block we see on that basis.
Honestly the Daily Stormer was the beginning of the end for Cloudflare. I used to respect them, once upon a time. Now with their non-neutrality, user-hostility like OP, rumors of being a government operation (and financials that really don't make sense), aggressive expansion, and constant deployment of even more privacy-averse products (dns, vpn, etc) they've basically become one of the final bosses of the internet.
One of the greatest strengths of the United States is a belief that speech, particularly political speech, is sacred. A website, of course, is nothing but speech... A website is speech. It is not a bomb. There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.
When people started asking why Cloudflare hosts racist and neo-nazi content, they eventually relented from their free speech position and stopped hosting one called The Daily Stormer. The CEO wrote a big blog post about how what he was doing is bad for the internet and free speech but he's going to do it anyways (I'm paraphrasing, read original words here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/). Since then, they've stopped working with a number of other sites due to content, like 8chan.
I think it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of situation for Cloudflare. They weren't really looking for political battles, but ended up having them anyways. I think this Wired article adds some interesting perspective: https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/