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Comment by Andre_Wanglin | Hacker News Reader

>because they were claiming Cloudflare agreed with their ideology.

That was a lie. It was a commenter on an article.

My tendency would be to ask for some sort of proof, though I realize asking for proof of nonexistence of evidence is near impossible. I'm inclined at present to place more trust in Cloudflare's word at this point, but I try to keep an open mind. It's always good to know both sides' stories.

Well, you have the CloudFlare blog where Prince states "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."[0] So, all that is necessary is to find this statement. I won't link to it but the Daily Stormer has been active on the clear web for most of the time intervening the seizure of their domain and now. Prince never provided any proof for his claim, not even a screenshot. Of course, a screenshot would have given away, via the visual context, that the statement wasn't from the "team" but from a forum commenter presenting the notion in a joking manner.

As it happens, an internal memo "leaked" to the media wherein Prince admitted he pulled the plug on The Daily Stormer because they are "assholes" and admitted that “The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them."[1] These forums are also what served as the area for readers to comment on articles. Ergo, he acknowledged that he knew his statement about the Daily Stormer "team" claiming CloudFlare supported their ideology was a lie.

You also have to go back in time and consider the context in which The Daily Stormer was successively de-platformed. The site had been publishing low-brow racist commentary including jokes about pushing Jews into ovens and referring to Africans as various simian species for years. It was, however, a single article wherein they mocked the woman who died at the Charlottesville, VA conflict between the alt-right and antifa that led to the widespread outrage that resulted in the The Daily Stormer being temporarily kicked off the internet.[2]

At the same time that Cloudflare was banning the Daily Stormer, they were (and still are, AFAIK) providing services to pro-pedophilia and ISIS web sites. The Daily Stormer itself pointed out not only the hypocrisy of this situation but also the risk it created to CloudFlare's continued safe harbor protections.[3]

[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ [1]: https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to... [2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/da... [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180401233331/https://dailystor...

You seem to know an awful lot about this specific case, and I'll defer to you on that. I know about the general case, technically speaking (though merely a DNS hobbyist).

However, having a business relationship with another organization is not a right. Hate speakers are not a protected class.

DNS does not operate in the same manner nor with the same assumptions. One can obviously run their own DNS resolver as has been pointed out repeatedly in this thread.

Please list the, "pro-pedophilia and ISIS web sites." hosted by Cloudflare?

Edit: There's probably a business opportunity for a registrar/DNS provider/host that operates under 'free speech purism,' though it's hard to say it won't go the way of usenet in that regard.

>Please list the, "pro-pedophilia and ISIS web sites." hosted by Cloudflare?

It's in the linked archived DS article and I confirmed the information is still true.

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