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Comment by bart_spoon | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand what those here rallying in defense of "free speech" are arguing. Free speech has not been violated. The government did not mandate this. As an individual citizen, I am allowed to say whatever I want under the protection of free speech. But I am not entitled to others providing me a platform for my speech. Other people/companies can't be coerced to provide me such a platform. And even if every person and company refuses to provide me a platform, my rights still aren't being violated, so long as the government isn't mandating it. Its just tough nuts.

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As has been explained in this thread multiple times now, Free Speech is a principle, not a law. If, for example, someone in North Korea spoke against their government and was executed for it, that'd be a violation of Free Speech. Arguing "but North Korea doesn't have a law protecting people who speak against the government" would be ridiculous.

Similarly, if a person or organization in the United States is silenced because they were deplatformed by a corporate oligarchy, it's ridiculous to argue "the US doesn't have any law which prevents that, so Free Speech has not been violated".

Free Speech has absolutely been impinged by this decision.

This is a very strange idea of what Free Speech is. The reason Free Speech is related to government is that government has a monopoly on violence. Government can turn up with guns at your house and stop you speaking in a way that no other body can. What is happening here is very different.

Cloudflare isn't preventing anyone from saying anything. All that is happening is Cloudflare is using it's freedom of association not to associate with this website. This has nothing to do with 8Chan's ability to publish what they want - only their ability to use Cloudflare's services to do so. As the article mentions - because the US has the principle of Free Speech enshrined in law, 8chan has the ability to go and use other services, or to develop the services that Cloudflare provided. This will not impact 8chan's ability to publish whatever they like.

Now there is a theoretical point of view, that if a company has a monopoly - it is effectively able to police speech, but that's absolutely not the case here, as is demonstrated in the past by companies going elsewhere to exercise their right.

What is being proposed as an understanding of Free Speech is not allowing private individuals from refusing to service to you. This would seem to be mandating someone to act - which is a principle quite far away from any law I've heard of.

Cloudflare may not be a monopoly, but they don't necessarily need to be a monopoly to be able to effectively police speech. A duopoly or oligopoly can be just as effective at that task, provided all competitors have similar rules about what sort of speech they disallow.

Now maybe we're not quite at that point yet (after all, the Daily Stormer did eventually find a CDN that would take them), but we may very well be getting close; there are only so many CDNs big enough to effectively shrug off large-scale DDOS attacks after all.

You also have to consider how difficult it is to match the quality of service provided by Cloudflare, and the hassle involved in switching to a new CDN. Cloudflare's refusal to service some organizations on the basis of ideology might have a chilling effect on Free Speech, even if it's not an insurmountable barrier.

I agree there is a balance between Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association. The question is: where do we draw the line?

Free Speech doesn’t require a CDN. Lol. It’s not like the First Amendment comes with a 99.999% uptime guarantee.

Some of you are so dense. Free speech is about not being dragged off in the middle of the night and sent to a gulag.

There’s no fine line here, no slippery slope. Everyone on 8chan is free to continue publishing whatever they want. It just won’t be published over a high availability CDN. It also won’t show up in Times Square.

There is a fine line, and I think that's easily illustrated with a few hypothetical counterexamples.

If you truly believe that "free speech is about not being dragged off in the middle of the night and sent to a gulag", and that that's all it's about for you, then would you, for example, be okay with a law stating that social media companies in the US are required to automatically filter any content critical of actions taken by the US military, and not display that content to people inside the US?

Yes, that's an extreme example, and yes it'd be illegal under the current US constitution, but it would be consistent with the extremely narrow definition of Free Speech you specified in your previous comment.

So, assuming that's not actually where you draw the line, where do you draw it? How much suppression of speech are you willing to tolerate before you would consider it unacceptable?

Your example is the gulag example. If you don’t do what the law says, stormtroopers come in and take you away. Thats a free speech issue, but that’s not what’s happening here. It’s not even close. It’s not a slippery slope. It’s just… nothing. Nothing is happening here.

I tolerate zero suppression. But that’s not what’s at issue here. We are talking about a CDN company refusing business of someone they don’t like, because it exposes them to bad PR and likely liability as well. No one is required to publish your content. I can post my dick all over Facebook, and that’s fine, because that’s not suppression of free speech. I can’t walk into CNN and demand airtime under a flag of free speech either.

The closest thing we ever had to an issue of free speech on the Internet was when ICANN was handing over domains to the feds over piracy issues. In that case their was a thin line. In that case there was a discussion to be had. Property was being seized by the government and people were being arrested and imprisoned for what some considered speech.

Here there is nothing. Just whiny, uneducated people with no concept of what free speech actually refers to.

No gulag. No stormtroopers. Your message criticizing the military just won't be seen anyone, because the platform you're posting on will censor it.

That's suppression of free speech; regardless of whether it's a government or a corporation that's doing it.

You totally misunderstand the way the legal system works in the United States. Let’s go ahead and examine your example.

Say that a law was passed that required Facebook and others to remove posts critical of the US military. In this example, if Facebook fails to comply, people will be arrested.

Facebook would sue the government, saying that the law is unconstitutional as it violates the First Amendment. This would likely become know as something like Facebook et al. vs The United States. Unless we are in a bizarro universe, Facebook would win.

In this example, Facebook’s rights, as a publisher, are the ones being trampled on, not yours. It’s not a people’s case. In this scenario you likely don’t even have standing to sue (debatable, I suppose, but that’s a separate discussion entirely).

It’s worth noting that the closest thing to this scenario was with the ACSS key years ago. Not quite the same, but similar parties involved along a similar line of thinking.

But the issue at hand with Cloudflare isn’t the same. There is no constitutional issue at all. It’s just one business dropping a client.

In fact, the only way this could ever turn into a free speech issue, even in principle, is if a law was passed that forced Cloudflare to continue to host 8chan’s content.

You should really do some reading about what free speech actually means. You are so far off the mark it’s hard to take you seriously.

Again, Free Speech is not a law, it's a principle. The question of whether or not this hypothetical law would be legal under the current version of the US constitution is irrelevant.

To repeat my previous point: assume the same law was passed in North Korea instead of the US. Would the law then be "not a violation of Free Speech" because North Korea has no legal protections for Free Speech?

You misunderstand even the principle or ethos of free speech, even by a radical GNU-style standard.

Take a step back, stop being so defensive, and realize you are wrong and you can actually learn something. You seem to care about this, so take it as an opportunity to actually learn what free speech is and what you can do to protect it.

Free speech is not some idea by which all companies much publish all content with an equal hand. That's an absurd standard. That's actually antithetical to free speech ideals, as it FORCES companies endorse speech that they, themselves, don't agree with.

> To repeat my previous point: assume the same law was passed in North Korea instead of the US. Would the law then be "not a violation of Free Speech" because North Korea has no legal protections for Free Speech?

Of course it would. It would be in the US, and it would be in North Korea.

North Korea is a great example, and it's not hypothetical. But in North Korea it is illegal for anyone to be critical of the military—not just asking certain publishers to be more selective about what they publish.

But none of this has anything to do with Cloudflare. Cloudflare is just a business. It's a non-essential, privately owned company that has nothing to do with the government. If someone from 8chan goes into the local Starbucks and starts screaming about killing Hispanics, Starbucks can ask them to leave. That's not a free speech violation.

If this was something like ICANN seizing a domain or the FCC refusing to issue a radio license you could at least make the "slippery slope" case with some kind of loose validity. But we aren't even talking about that. No one has to support your speech. Dell doesn't have to sell you computers for your server farm and Cloudflare doesn't have to sell you CDN services. CNN doesn't have to give you airtime, and Amazon doesn't have to publish your book.

You can build a horrific media empire that endorses and promotes the most disgusting and hateful forms of speech imaginable, but NO ONE has to support you in doing that. And, in fact, no one SHOULD be forced to.

Just look at Alex Jones. No one has arrested him (minus an incident in New York with him literally screaming into someone's face with a megaphone, which was borderline assault) and no one should. But no one has to support him either.

ICANN is great example. ICANN is a private organization, not a government. Are you saying that simply because they're _not_ a government, they should be allowed to censor domains based on their own ideas about what is and isn't acceptable speech?

Yes, ICANN is a bit different because ICANN is effectively a monopoly. But again, see my previous comment explaining why you don't need to be a monopoly to effectively police speech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20614680

The point is, it doesn't matter who's doing the censoring. Once you reach the point where you're actively hindering people from expressing ideas in a public space (such as the internet), you're impinging Free Speech. Now maybe that's acceptable to a certain extent when the only alternative is to impinge upon a company's freedom of association. That's why I say there's a balance between those two principles. But the question remains: where should the line be drawn?

I mean, we know where we draw the line. That's not a rhetorical question. It's written into law.

We know where we currently draw the line, from a legal perspective. That wasn't my question though.

Nobody has a right to a CDN or a right to DDOS protection. Cloudflare is a private company offering a service in exchange for money. They may deny service to whomever they wish (with exceptions for certain protected classes). Political leanings and ideologies do not constitute a protected class. Neither Cloudflare, nor Google, nor FaceBook, nor Reddit, nor HN for that matter have any legal or moral obligation to grant a platform to anyone. A private platform reserves all rights to the content on their platform. If you have an issue with how that is policed or moderated then you are free to create your own competing service.

You're falling back on the legal argument again. Again: Free Speech is not a law, it's a principle.

Sure, even without a CDN a sufficiently well-funded organization could spend millions of dollars on the infrastructure necessary to resist a powerful DDOS attack. But if that's enough in your mind to satisfy the principle of free speech, then you're essentially saying that it's okay if it costs millions of dollars to speak freely on the internet. I'm not sure that's a good policy.

I clearly said no moral obligation. That covers your claim of Free Speech as a principle. A private organization does not owe you their bandwidth.

> then you're essentially saying that it's okay if it costs millions of dollars to speak freely on the internet.

No. Go buy a RaspberryPi for $35. Now you can host your own site and say whatever you would like on the internet. Again, nobody owes you anything. Nobody is obliged to carry my message. You have a right speak freely. You do not have a right to be heard.

A Raspberry Pi can be trivially overloaded with a simple DOS attack. (Not even DDOS.) If you've got anything remotely controversial to say, I wouldn't count on that being sufficient to keep your site online. The infrastructure necessary to remain online during a coordinated attack isn't cheap; that's why Cloudflare advertises DDOS protection as one of the many services they offer: https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos/

Whether or not a cloud infrastructure company "owes" content-neutral treatment to their customers is a matter which, I think, is up for debate. Particularly in this day and age where the internet has become such an important venue for political speech.

How is that different from someone shouting you down in the public square?

Well, for one, DDOS attacks can be carried out by a single anonymous individual, and don't require them to show up in-person to shout you down.

> You have a right speak freely. You do not have a right to be heard.

"You have the right to speak freely as long as you can't effectively do it"? Not much of a right then, is it?

I wonder what would have happened to the civil rights movement or the women's right movement if people with that kind of attitude had existed back then? Those were widely opposed movements back then too.

> "You have the right to speak freely as long as you can't effectively do it"

That's a pretty gross misrepresentation of what I said. Think of it another way. Prior to the internet could TV and radio stations be forced to play an ad they disagree with? Could newspapers and magazines be forced to print ads or op-eds they disagree with?

You cannot force someone else to carry your message. If you are unable to broadcast the message yourself and nobody else is willing to broadcast it for you then that is your own issue. No private entity is responsible for giving you a platform.

I'm always amazed at how right wingers are all "property rights, property rights". And when something like this happens, they quickly switch from demanding that the property rights of CloudFlare be observed, to "free speech, free speech" concerning the conservatives on 8chan.

That's a large brush you're using to paint a group of individuals. I think I would be considered conservative by a lot of the more liberal types here but think that CloudFlare is within their rights to do what they want.

In this case, "property rights", as you put it are at odds with free speech. I don't think it would be ideologically inconsistent to believe that free speech trumps property rights in cases where the two principles conflict.

I also think there's a lot more nuance to this situation than you seem to be implying. I very much doubt there are a significant number of people ("right wingers" or otherwise) who believe property rights are the most important concern in all situations, nor are there many who believe in an absolute right to Free Speech at any cost. (The constitution itself allows for narrow exceptions for both of those rights.)

So CloudFlare gets absolutely no say in what they host and serve on their private property because of "Free Speech"?

Maybe. We've already banned companies from discriminating on the basis of race. Would a limited ban on telecommunications infrastructure companies discriminating on the basis of ideology really be all that bad?

If anything, it would certainly free those companies from having to act as arbiters of moral truth.

That would be great, but sadly the companies are not doing it out of their own free will, they are pushed by the government in some way to do that. And so far legislations around the world only move in a direction to make that government involvement more explicit, not enforce more freedom.

I am far left and thing free speech is the underpinning of any successful democracy. Your bias betrays you.

"Free Speech has absolutely been impinged by this decision."

No, it hasn't. No one has a moral, legal, or ethical responsibility to pay for someone else's speech. The government must tread lightly, but private individuals are under no compulsion to listen to others. 8chan is NOT having their speech rights infringed, they are simply having a business agreement terminated. They are still 100% free to create a website somewhere else, write a book, or protest in the streets.

Do not confuse private property (Cloudflare's servers) with the public square.

The problem with that argument is that there's no such thing as a "public square" on the internet. Everything on the internet is controlled by a private company in some manner or another. Whether you're talking about DNS, cloud hosting, ISPs, CDNs, or CAs there are always going to be some number of privately controlled intermediaries with the means to censor your speech.

For some of these entities, such as CDNs with enough infrastructure to stand up against large-scale DDOS attacks, there may only be a small number of viable options. What happens if all of those companies collectively decide to censor someone? You've effectively created a corporate oligarchy with the power to decide what sort of speech is and isn't allowed on the internet.

Now again, maybe we're not quite at that point yet (after all, the Daily Stormer did eventually find a CDN that would take them), but we may very well be getting close. You also have to consider that even without a true oligopoly; there's still a chilling effect created when a large percentage of the internet's major infrastructure providers collectively decide to censor certain speech on the basis of ideology.

At what point do you believe freedom of speech outweighs freedom of association? We've already decided freedom from racial discrimination trumps freedom of association, so it's not like this sort of thing would be entirely without precedent.

Do you actually know what Cloudflare does? I'm not sure you quite understand what a CDN is.

A CDN isn't necessary. It's a convenience for end users. You don't need a CDN to prevent DDoS. In fact having a CDN is probably the most expensive way to handle DDoS.

CDNs protect against DDOS by distributing request handling over a wide geographical area, filtering suspicious requests, and caching responses to avoid hammering the origin server.

Cloudflare offers all of that as a service: https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos/

You can reduce the effectiveness of DDOS in other ways, but there's only so much you can do when you're limited to a few servers with limited bandwidth. Ultimately the only way to weather a large, brute force DDOS is by having enough capacity to service all incoming requests, which is something a CDN helps provide.

A CDN doesn’t actually help provide that for a website like 8chan. If the main server goes down, it goes down. Cloudflare will just cache old pages.

8chan wasn’t exactly designed for distributed architecture. Did you even ever use the site?

Cloudflare does way more than just cache pages. As I said, they can also filter requests, even going so far in extreme cases as to use a captcha to validate that the one making the request is human before forwarding the request upstream to the origin server.

I've never used 8Chan, but my understanding is that it's a simple forum site, like 4Chan. That seems at a cursory glance to be feasible to run in a distributed manner; though I guess it depends on how the application itself is architected. That's kinda irrelevant though, since as I just explained a well designed CDN like Cloudflare can remove a lot of the need for the site itself to implement a distributed infrastructure. (At least so long as DDOS is the cause of your scaling issue, and not legitimate traffic.)

"The problem with that argument is that there's no such thing as a "public square" on the internet."

There's also no public square in magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, libraries aren't required to stock your book, nor book stores, no one has to lease you space for a store, etc. You have the right to speak, no one has an obligation to listen or pay attention. No one has an obligation to help you speak, etc. That's what I mean when I said, "do not confuse public square with private property." Just because everyone watches TV and uses the internet does not mean anyone has a RIGHT to express themselves there.

I agree. Similarly, I cannot be forced at gunpoint by the government to provide a cake for a gay wedding if I have a moral objection.

Discriminatory business practices should not be conflated with free speech.

What I produce in my business is an expression of myself that I may or may not exchange with another. I have the right to or not to associate with whomever I choose to.

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