> This isn't an argument that an American ISP could use to censor content under our current regulation, why should a CDN be allowed to?
Considering that CDN usually have hosting hardware all over the globe, they would most likely want to cover their asses everywhere, not just in the US. The US isn't the whole and only standard here, even if it's the center of discussion right now.
It's also not like any of this would be unheard off, there's other content all over the Internet that we (as in "pretty much the whole world") take no issue removing if we find it, mostly if it involves children. But there's also a whole global infrastructure in place to lock you out of "the visible internet" without you having broken any actual laws anywhere: Copyright
DMCA's and ChillingEffects have been abused plenty of times for making wrong claims, but it's all in the name of "profits" so we just accept that kind of "censorship" without question or much of a debate. Even tho that would probably also have made a better angle for "The Internet lost it's neutrality long ago" compared to trying to lionize literal neo-Nazis as the champions of free speech.
> In the words of Cloudflare's CEO: “I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the internet.” So I'd say your doubt is misplace, that's a pretty accurate description of what did happen.
Is it really tho? [0] I mean, even if that's what actually happened, I still don't see the issue because Cloudflare doesn't hold any monopoly on hosting content on the Internet. It can influence its visibility quite much, sure, but nobody is getting locked out of the Internet over "bad moods".
> At least not the American internet, as you pointed out, they're still up but they had to move their hosting to Hong Kong to stay up. So I think it's fair to say that American net neutrality failed them.
No offense, but to me "American internet" is an oxymoron, just like net neutrality isn't a mere national issue.
> Now, of course, you may be of the mind: "Who cares? They're Nazis they deserve what they got." But as soon as you go down the path of "we treat sites neutrally... we just treat some sites more neutrally than others." It begins to erode your support as people wonder if they'll eventually be part of the excepted group that doesn't get net neutrality.
Disclaimer: I'm German, as such this whole situation feels quite familiar because in Germany the government has been actually trying to go after similar themed content, with a legal framework to back it, for over a decade now.
Guess how successful they've been, even with the content being deemed illegal by German law? Not very. Just like there's still plenty of (in most places illegal) nasty children content on the Internet.
To me that says a lot about the resilience of "net neutrality" in the global picture. Maybe that's where this is poised to lead to anyway; "Controversial" content only gets hosted in certain regions but is still reachable from everywhere. Which has been the de-facto way it's been working for as long as I can think anyway, the only new thing here is that some people/companies in the US started overthinking their standards as to what constitutes as "controversial content"
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/