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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean, you don’t trust them? Cloudflare provides services to scummy websites, yes. But Cloudflare isn’t doing anything to promote these websites, trick users into visiting them, or otherwise aide them in any way other than providing the exact same services they provide to everybody else.

I fully understand disagreeing with Cloudflare’s decision to turn a blind eye towards what their customers are doing. I just don’t understand why this behavior means you “don’t trust them”. What do you think Cloudflare is going to do?

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Something is clearly and obviously illegal. Nobody can say there's ambiguity about the legitimacy of these sites. Yet Cloudflare not only does nothing even when these sites are reported to them, they help make sure the sites continue to run.

Would the problem here be more clear if Cloudflare did nothing when people use them to provide hosting services for child porn sites? Why do you think it's OK for Cloudflare to decide when to ignore the law and when to do something about obviously illegal content?

Providing services to malware sites isn't illegal. Providing services to child porn sites is. That's the distinction that Cloudflare draws.

> That's the distinction that Cloudflare draws

And we free persons are at liberty to disagree with their lime. Personally, their delineation seems self-serving and marginally scummy. (The service and this app are appreciated and used.)

How about torrent sites? Where would you personally draw the line? It has to be drawn somewhere.

Actually, sites which claim they are one thing (Adobe, a bank's web site) when they obviously aren't are, in fact, illegal.

But hey - if you want to pretend that a site which pretends to be Bank of America is somehow in some grey area, then by all means be a phishing apologist.

Sites that sell malware aren’t pretending to be Bank of America.

Also, while I certainly believe that some phishing site pretending to be Bank of America should be illegal, I’m not actually sure what law that would violate. Is it actually illegal or do you just believe that it it should be? And I’m not looking for “it violates copyright/trademark” as an answer, that’s a civil issue.

The issue here is there is not clear line for where one should start and stop moderating their own service. eg do they disallow anything illegal? What about stuff that is illegal in some countries but not others? What about stuff that is immoral but not illegal? Then who defines what is immoral and what is unpopular? Or do you then just ban anything that is also unpopular as well?

There is a reason why platforms like Cloudflare, Google and ISPs are against proactively moderating their own services; from a business standpoint it's an expensive and futile task (because it's dead easy for malicious actors to set up new sites and re-abuse the aforementioned services) and from a social perspective it's not Cloudflares job as a CDN to dictate what is and isn't socially acceptable.

Now just because Cloudflare have taken the decision not to police the internet that doesn't mean they cannot be trusted with your privacy. Those two points you're trying to equate are actually unrelated.

Its just weird they are willing to censor legal speech but not illegal things like malware.

Have they said they won't? Or is it just more difficult to stamp out? The malware sites can use any URL, so I imagine it's difficult to stamp out automatically.

Cloudflare explicitly takes a hands-off approach. They said they'll provide their basic services to anyone and everyone as long as it's not violating the law (which basically means they won't protect child pornography sites), and they explicitly don't police the content of the sites. AIUI their rationale is that it's so easy to DDoS sites these days that everyone deserves to have access to basic DDoS protection no matter who they are or what they believe.

Except they're not willing to censor legal speech.

What they did was, one time and one time only, kicked someone off their platform for publicly advertising that Cloudflare supported their awful site. This was a unilateral decision made by the Cloudflare CEO because he was mad that they were saying that, and it's a decision that he admitted was wrong and said would not happen again.

So this wasn't about "censoring legal speech" but rather for the specific act of trying to publicly associate Cloudflare with white supremacy ideology, and it's something they've committed to not doing again.

Actions speak much louder than words. They did it knowing it violated their principles yet they want to eat their cake and have it too. We wouldn't give another corporation the same benefit of the doubt, but because they are in tech we're willing to use a double standard.

They were absolutely right in what they did. Free speech does not mean you have to give a platform to people you find abhorrent.

That's fine, but if CloudFlare believes that then they shouldn't write long winded blog posts explaining how they believe the exact opposite immediately after de-platforming someone.

Its the two-faced nature of it I object to.

Being a common carrier does, though. If they want to be treated like a common carrier - and I think there's a reasonable case for treating infrastructure providers like that - they should be expected to act like one.

Well i would like to see you if some hardcore communists were claiming you are supporting them because you let them use your service?

Its private company - those can choose who they make bussiness with.

Also lets not forget they are nothing like carrier. Carrier laws exist because there is no possible alternative. This is just CDN we are talking about. You can quite easily replace it, even yourself.

> Free speech does not mean you have to give a platform to people you find abhorrent.

From wikipedia: "Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction."

A platform either supports free speech or it doesn't. Most of them do not. That's fine as long as we (and they) understand the difference between freedom and censorship. Freedom is awesome but comes at a cost, censorship is good too but comes at a cost...

I sort of agree with the parent. They clearly had the right to do what they did, and the world is probably a better place for it but then if they're willing to bend their "neutrality" principle for that then why not for other things?

And let's be clear, I'm not taking the stance that they shouldn't refuse service to hate speech websites, I'm saying that IMO they morally and ethically should strive not to provide service to obvious scams and malware websites either.

I really don't think that the "common carrier" angle holds any water. An ISP requires infrastructure and as a user you don't even have a lot of choice about which one you use. Even if you do have a choice it's not like you can change your ISP easily and quickly. That's why "common carrier" and net neutrality make some sense in that context.

Cloudflare is much closer to a web host than an ISP. You can still very much host websites that will be accessible by everybody without Cloudflare's help. If OVH hosted spammers and botnets and refused to do anything about it under the guise of "free speech" would we consider that a good thing? Is it really all that noble?

You can read some of the reaction here: https://www.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-criticism/

It's so strange that we live in a time where refusing to give a platform to Nazis is considered controversial. Perhaps we are due another world war.

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