What about ISPs? Should Cox, Comcast, Frontier, etc be liable for what flows through their pipes? Media companies say yes, but what do you do when your ISP says “bye” because you visit 4chan? Go to another ISP? In most areas of the US, you can’t
Not legally, nor morally.
Morally we can argue that there's virtue (or a lot of global positive utility if we use an utilitarian framework) in making sure that there's an open marketplace for ideas, and every idea has opportunity to be "priced". But there's also virtue in keeping that place healthy, sane and constructive. Hate speech, manifestos, slur memes, and other kinds of low-effort content seems to be rather unhealthy for the place.
While at the same time doing a proper academic study on intelligence, brains, genetics, education, socioeconomic status, social mobility, and group dynamics at large is healthy. Context, style, framing is important. Blurting out that "blacks" have lower IQ in some measure might even be true, but that's not really an idea for that marketplace. Connecting the dots, uncovering the causes, the dynamics (noticing that the main driver is not some inherent genetic/cultural inferiority, but simple socioeconomic status due to historical path dependence) - and raising awareness and offering solutions is healthy.
Yes, of course, it's upon us to make a value judgement about what's a virtue, what's healthy. And no wonder some people think that even adopting the Golden Rule (do only what you want others to do, see also Rawl's reflective equilibrium) just means we have to "purge the weak" and that "civilizations are destined to clash". Of course we can't do much with that, other than trying to persuade them AND trying to minimize these voices so they remain a weak but vocal minority. (Hence our choice of idea policing is not just because we happen to think equality and pacifism are virtuous, but because our survival, way of life and so might depend on it.) [And in that way, yes cultures are destined to clash, and we ought to think a pacifist-equalist is the one that should win - nothing to do about it, another value judgement to make.]
The phone company is required to serve you even if they disagree with you not because of some high-minded ideas about free speech, but because it’s considered really important for people to have phone service.
...according to Title II, yes, they absolutely are.
If you have a monopolistic ISP that refuses to provide service to you because they don't like your content, and they're your only option, then that's a problem.
If you have multiple tens of CDN providers and they all don't want to carry your content, then perhaps you should really take a look at your content and have a hard think about why it isn't wanted.
And regardless, a CDN isn't necessary to host a website. A CDN certainly makes it easier to achieve lower-latency global reach, and is useful in helping you weather certain types of attacks on your infrastructure, but they're by no means required. And there are other ways to achieve those goals.
Hosting a site, on the other hand, has a multitude of very different providers to choose from. Even if you manage to get banned from every hosting provider in the US, ship a server to a colo in Kyrgyzstan or whatever, and keep right on going.
LOL. They are not.
Being a messenger doesn't require being amoral.
Why? There is no reason they should be forced to host content they find objectionable.
Please educate yourself on the law here. Most everyone in tech wants the internet to be a utility, but it's not. An individual internet company's product offering is definitely not a utility.
If Cloudflare was the only game in town (or close to it), I might be more sympathetic to this argument, but... they're not. Not even close.
There are lots of providers with massive DDoS protection capacity specializing in hosting illegal or otherwise questionable content, they just charge more than cloudflare.
Botnet C&Cs, cybercrime forums and card shops all need hosting and face massive attacks. Somehow I never hear the operators of those complaining.
The point is that what 8chan is doing is egregious enough for them to step in and cease doing business with them. This isn't a slippery slope kind of thing.