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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how it's out of context. Once you're on record as saying you decided to police content in one case, it becomes a lot harder to use "we don't police content" as a defense in another case.

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Except that's not Cloudflare's defense. Cloudflare's defense was "we're just a cache, not a provider, so we can't shutdown these sites, as they don't need us to work". And now ALS is grabbing the CEO's statement that they have booted the Daily Stormer off the Internet and going "aha, so you can shutdown sites". Which is a misleading interpretation - they still can't, they just know that in this case the Daily Stormer will be DDoS'ed to hell if they remove their protection.

The other side is not asking Cloudflare to shutdown the sites, just to terminate their accounts and not provide service to them.

https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-faces-lawsuit-for-assist...

Right, but Cloudflare's position is that they're not providers, they're just an intermediate, and therefore they forward DMCA takedown requests to the actual hosting provider. Not being able to shutdown the sites is a fact that helps establish their position as mere intermediates.

It's actually quite easy to defend, using another HN trope that somehow never appears in these threats: "Read 'Whataboutism' on Wikipedia".

Pointing out an apparent contradiction in policy - claiming one thing but doing another - isn't whataboutism.

Whataboutism would be, for example, CF attempting to defend retaining dodgy/illegal sites by attacking ALS for its dodgy/illegal origins.

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