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Comment by danielweber | Hacker News Reader

I get this argument. I have made it in the past.

But CF doesn't want to play Internet cop. Everyone who manages a service gets a constant barrage of "someone using your site did something offensive, I want you to kick them off your service!"

CF has decided they are just not going to play the game, at all. Because once they start, then all the piranha come to feast.

I'm not saying this means they aren't a racket, which is charging people money to solve a problem you made. But they do have some good reasons for simply refusing to censor what they offer.

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It's not a game, it's policing your own network and keeping your business activities legal. My network has run an abuse desk for 15 years and there are no feasting piranhas (what does that even mean?).

Cloudflare definitely already runs an abuse desk, and ban accounts, they just choose not to ban network abuse tools. They are making the internet a more dangerous place for hosting, then asking you to buy a solution. They could search Google for "booter" and "ddos tool" and whatever else, and flag sites for banning, it's a project an intern could do. But they don't, and they suck for that.

They could ban booters. But then someone else will say "but you allow <some other type of site>! They're clearly bad, you should ban them too". And so they do, and now someone else complains about some other site. Once you start banning sites for the content they hold, where do you draw the line? I don't fault CloudFlare for drawing it at the legal barrier (e.g. no CP).

> Once you start banning sites for the content they hold, where do you draw the line?

I mean, you could always just draw the line at booters. Not everything has such a slippery slope.

You can say that. But I guarantee you if they do that, other people will think they should ban other sites too.

Really the only way to avoid the problem is to not play the game, and so that's what CloudFlare does. It's pretty much the only defensible stance to take.

They can draw the line wherever they like, they are under zero obligation to provide a service to anyone they don't want to.

CloudFlare should not align itself with the adversaries its mission is to protect its users from. This isn't a slippery slope distinction, this is a binary exclusion.

Call it a conflict of interest then. The worse the internet at large becomes, the more money cloudflare makes.

DOS attacks being a bad thing is the whole reason the service exists, so to then group it with "things some people consider offensive" is just double think. If Cloud Flare didn't want to play internet cop in regards to DOS attacks, it would not exist. Since it does, it might as well say the same things with both sides of the mouth.

DDoS attack protection is just one of the services CloudFlare offers. Saying it's the whole reason the service exists suggests that you haven't actually looked at what they do.

Change "the" reason to "one of the main reasons" (and going from the top left to bottom right, the second of their four main features), and notice how my point remains untouched?

Your point is still incorrect. CloudFlare is NOT playing "internet cop" for DOS. They're providing armor against it, but they're not "policing" it in any sense of the word.

So DOS are "clearly bad" when it comes to providing "armour" against them, but a matter of taste, something a person could not possibly have an opinion on when it's a client of theirs?

> they're not "policing" it in any sense of the word.

I didn't say they do, I say it's double faced. Which it is.

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