Hacker News Reader

Comment by boramalper | Hacker News Reader

What people (seemingly) fail to realise is that neither Cloudflare is the Internet nor Voxility is a public infrastructure. They are private enterprises which are free to act in however they want with regards to the service they provide as laid out in their contract.

That is the danger of centralisation; when they remove their service, it feels as if your rights has been violated because (a) you have been so used to them (b) you cannot exist without them practically.

Now imagine it resurrecting on IPFS/Dat/..., where every visitor could "pin" the website.

View on HN

> What people (seemingly) fail to realise is that neither Cloudflare is the Internet nor Voxility is a public infrastructure.

Everyone realizes that. We're past relying on the First Amendment argument.

> Everyone realizes that.

Based on some of the posts in this thread, I disagree.

There are a lot of people in this thread that don't seem to understand the difference between the law and the principle.

The first amendment law protects the principle. It doesn't create it. While these hosts might not be in violation of any law, they are absolutely acting contrary to the principle of free speech.

"The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means."

I think these calls to disregard and/or weaking the principle first enshrined in the founding of this country are a greater danger than 3 mentally ill people with guns.

And you are welcome to do so. If you wish also to convince others, merely stating that this is what you think probably won't suffice.

The arguments are generally over how private entities with relatively control of communications are regulated, not that the entities are private.

You can only pull the "They're a private entity - just choose not to do business with them" card until they're large enough to the point were you don't have an option (free market forces stop working), at which point regulators generally step in.

Decentralization is tempting for anti-censorship advocates, but the thing to remember is that freer services only win if they're also better for people who don't care about censorship, which means most people. Decentralized services are easy to demonize to the extent that they allow non-approved matters. The only way to escape that is to be so much better that it doesn't matter, like the web was in the 90s.

>They are private enterprises which are free to act in however they want with regards to the service they provide as laid out in their contract.

Are they also free to only do business with people of certain races? The "private enterprises" line lost its punch about 50 years ago.

A private company must act as public infrastructure once it becomes a de facto monopoly.

edit: nah

The regulation applied to electric and telephone companies in the US...

How can people be this ignorant of recent history?

It might not be true in the general case yet, but it's certainly a sentiment I can get behind. Privately-owned toll roads shouldn't be able to ban political opponents - why should the Internet equivalent be different?

None of the companies discontinuing relationships with 8chan are monopolies. In some cases they're just the last in their category to finally drop 8chan.

A company selling compute resources to run web servers is not even close to in a monopoly position

Your argument aside, Cloudflare is definitely not a monopoly. There are many, possibly hundreds, of different CDNs that run at scale.

What is Cloudflare's share anyway? Akamai would be #1, right?

I've always been intrigued by this, do you think that platforms such as YouTube should be considered public infrastructure? And if so for what reasons?

I'll take that argument seriously when it's accompanied by proposals to buy it out and nationalize it to run at cost rather than make a profit.

Yes they are private, and of course, they are free to choose there own customer.

On the other side, as long 8chan did nothing illegal, they shouldn't shutdown 8chan. If 8chan did something illegal, then for this we have the whole justice system.

If people think 8chan does something bad, but is not illegal .. then people should vote to change the law.

If private company's start to play the police .. it does end in a disaster. Special since today's web is a winner takes it all model. If you felt out of Youtube .. yeah, just bad for you. Apple credit card .. yeah, you can buy just almost everything .. yeah, bright future ..

Nobody is shutting them down. Cloudflare (a private company) is just choosing to no longer work with them. 8chan is completely free to operate their own servers.

Exactly. It is entirely within their right to choose who they serve, and should be so too.

Flipping the issue, wouldn't my freedom be violated if I was forced to serve someone that I do not want to?

Yes, I stand to my word before, Cloudflare is 100% free to choose there own customer.

But if feel it's a bad move just to throw 8chan out because "it is rainy today".

My point was more, we start to privatize all services. From Internet to money to .. whatever. For me it's just wrong if the private companys start to act instead the justice. That's my real point. There is a justice system and they just should do the job.

Like baking a cake?

It's their right to associate or not associate through business with whoever they like as long as they are not breaking the law. Are they breaking the law? If not then it's now you suggesting imposing your viewpoint on them in a way that restricts their 1st amendment rights.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com