Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbreit | Hacker News Reader

"it is likely that the requested information will be handed over"

I would say the opposite at this point. Cloudflare has a track record of sticking to its principles and has demonstrated a willingness to defend them in court.

View on HN

Attorney here! (Not offering legal advice, though.)

That doesn't mean they'll prevail. It's very difficult to get a judge to quash a subpoena demanding a business produce customer records that are needed to identify a potential party to a civil action.

What principles? I can't find a mission statement or list of principles on their site, and it wasn't long ago that Cloudflare joined GoDaddy and others in shutting down the Daily Stormer -- one of the principles of a CDN might be supporting a free and open internet, but that isn't supported by their actions.

While I agree with you in principle, they aren't required to host content that they don't want to. They certainly shouldn't be actively shutting down content, however that's not the same as declining to host content. I'm somewhat surprised that a conservative network hasn't been established to support the White Power, Alex Jones, Gab types of places. It would seem to be at the minimum a viable business for a niche audience.

The problem with the US-based companies is, that they are required to reveal their private customer data even without judge's approval[1], depending on who asks for it.

[1] https://apnews.com/4986e44871dc4f70a467239fa49b15dd

Why do you limit this to US-based companies? I can't think of any country in the world where a company is sovereign and can withhold private data from the government. In most of them, a judge's approval would not be required.

The difference is, how much private customer data a company can reveal without a judge's approval. In many European countries it's limited only to meta-data (i.e., basic account information).

I'm thinking of China and Russia, South America, Africa, you know "most" of the countries of the world. You are thinking of "best practices" countries but really, most countries grant no such privilege to companies (or their citizens).

> You are thinking of "best practices" countries

I tried to compare the US to other Western countries, most of which are in Europe[1], but you might be right, that in this regard it stands closer to Russia and China.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world#/media/File:The_...

The first part of that sentence that you omitted is explaining that they already did have their chance to respond to the order in court. They did not respond, and now the order stands.

Any chance of that working went out the window now that they demonstrated the willingness to kick people off of the service altogether.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com