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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

Booting Daily Stormer has definitely caused problems in their case, but let's be real here: 1) DS hasn't in fact been kicked off the Internet. 2) There's a huge difference between being a _possible_ copyright infringer and a _declared_ Nazi. 3) DS hasn't engaged in the kind of identity-cloaking whack-a-mole so beloved of copyright infringers.

I'm sure any competent lawyer could add another 20 points off the top of their head. In short, yeah it complicates the case, but the fat lady hasn't even cleared her throat.

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DS has in fact been kicked off the Internet although not by Cloudflare (replaced with BitMitigate[1]) but by registrars/registries. They are currently on their nth domain name and these keep getting yanked.

What I wonder about is why they're not using a .us domain. Its operators should be bound by the US first amendment since they derive their monopoly from the USG. Maybe it's an elaborate troll. Especially since they're now on .cat.

Either way, the abandonment of free speech on the Internet by the companies which benefited the most from it is very worrisome.

[1] https://bitmitigate.com/a-commitment-to-liberty.html

> Maybe it's an elaborate troll.

Of course it is. The entire point is provocation. How many people heard of Daily Stormer for the first time as a result of this whole drawn-out incident? Rather more than knew about it in the first place, I'd wager, judging by Google Trends and overall coverage.

Look at Stormfront, a more obscure (but probably worse) website: their domain got locked, but they seem to have it back now. Interestingly, it appears to be a registrar that issued a statement denouncing Daily Stormer.

This is probably why...

"In 2005, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration ruled that registrants of .us domains may not secure private domain name registration via anonymizing proxies, and that their contact information must be made public." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.us

This is the same reason their .is domain was yanked.

https://grapevine.is/news/2017/09/29/dailystormer-likely-los...

This might also be interesting for some people: a full timeline of news and bannings of the daily stormer: https://time.graphics/line/3812

Why does that matter? It's no secret who runs the site.

Founder is trying to avoid being served papers in a lawsuit- if he gives up his actual current residency he makes it easier to get served:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/lawsuit-against-...

Weev (Stormer's CTO, I guess) claims that SPLC is trying not to serve Anglin once he retained Marc Randazza to avoid having to bring a lawsuit they're likely to lose.

http://weev.net/splc-i-will-personally-serve-andrew-anglin-f...

Weev is in this thread, actually. Search for CTO and you'll find his profile.

If you were them, would you want to make your physical address public?

But the abandonment of free speech by _private_ company, while worrisome, is very understandable. Internet and the SV made everyone more utilitarist. A lot of CEO (or website owner) think that way: it may not be very legal, but since it reduce cost and make more people happy than it make people unhappy, it should be fine. But from an utilitarist point of view, intolerance have a huge cost and create more unhappy people (not talking about violence, just people being the target of this intolerance) than happy people. Therefore, intolerant behavior should be stopped if there is some possibility.

Now, of course this was a mistake, but this mistake is understandable.

(I'm more of a negative utilitarist myself, but this work the same way)

problem is, having unimpeded speech online requires being harbored by private companies, as there really isn't much in terms of government-managed domains, government-managed DDoS protection, etc

Consider this: spam is speech too. No-one's seriously suggesting Twitter and Facebook shouldn't clamp down on that.

The sad part is that one is illegal and one isn't. It's a bigger problem for Cloudflare to act as the moral police by kicking off Nazis without them doing anything illegal. Copyright infringement is a more clear cut case. If there's a court order it makes sense to take the site off, and otherwise a blanket refusal.

> There's a huge difference between being a _possible_ copyright infringer and a _declared_ Nazi.

There is indeed. One is illegal.

Possibly infringing, is not illegal, infringing is.

Correct. Nazism is illegal in some jurisdictions.

Hmm, what about _declared_ terrorists and _actual_ killers which post videos of them throwing gays off the top of buildings? Cloudflare was providing service to those people.

> 1) DS hasn't in fact been kicked off the Internet

It has however been kicked off Cloudfare and that's what the plaintiff wants to happen in their case also.

I think the main impact is that I had never heard of that website before cloudlfare took that decision. Massive publicity.

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