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Comment by allemagne | Hacker News Reader

I get that you're trying to address a larger philosophical question, but what action are you actually suggesting in this particular instance?

Should Cloudflare be forced to host 8chan?

Even more than YouTube/Twitter, this seems like a clear case of business owners deciding that 8chan is too much of a liability to do business with.

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If we think of CF/Voxility as of a "neutral infrastructure", CF and Voxility shouldn't be "forced to host", but also shouldn't proactively shut down sites, unless there's an obvious violation of ToS. There's a process of forcing companies to do something, and it involves a judge and a jury.

I find it ironic to see cheering of these actions by The Verge, who is in the tank for "net neutrality". I don't like what site in question was hosting, but there're other ways of dealing with them.

> If we think of CF/Voxility as of a "neutral infrastructure"

"Property rights for me but not for you"

Nobody denies property rights to CF and Voxility. At the same time, both companies went into the contract with the site in question. Did said site violate the contract? From my reading of the situation, no. "Contract obligations for me but not for thee?"

And to be clear: I do think that companies have capacity to terminate contracts, however, there either should be clear violation of ToS, or court's decision behind that. Neither seem to have had happened in this case.

> there either should be clear violation of ToS

I'm not aware of any consumer-accessible supplier who provides ToS that require abuse. In particular, CS doesn't:

"we may at our sole discretion terminate your user account or suspend or terminate your access to the Service at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Service at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Service) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Service or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Service. You may terminate your account at any time through the Service’s account dashboard."

And there was certainly meeting of the minds on this term. CF has booted sites in the past due to political backlash. Those boots were high-profile and well-covered in the news. And even without those high-profile boots, any reasonable person will expect someone using CF and running a site like 8chan to know what CF's terms say about terms for continuing service with any/no reason.

If you want your site to stay up even in the event of one of your customers committing a mass murder while your other customers cheer him on, then don't use CF.

It's true that finding another provider might be hard unless you have $$$ because the market for that product is really small -- not even 8chan's original founder is in that target market.

Oh well. I want $0.001 diapers for my kid and a lower grocery bill. The market doesn't provide those either. But if universal access to cheap diapers and high-quality food aren't fundamental human rights, I don't see why cheap anything-goes top-of-the-line DDoS protection services should be.

>Should Cloudflare be forced to host 8chan?

If they have a monopoly on a necessary infrastructure, yes.

Alternatively, should the local power company be forced to provide electricity service to a resident in their area they do not like?

Utilities are regulated and it generally is for the good of the consumer to not have their heat/ac turned off in either extreme.

Are you suggesting this is somehow equivalent? Should we regulate the internet and hosts that serve?

That is the entire purpose of the Net Neutrality Debate, which most on HN support but then go against the spirit of that debate when a company shuts down people they find politically abhorrent

You can not support Net Neutrality and support this action by CF without being a hypocrite

Something relevant in my opinion is that companies could be upfront about it. If you do not want to host despicable content you can say that you reserve the right to terminate accounts for such and such reasons.

Youtube has as a policy that they will demonetize/ban you if you bring in bad PR (which has been abused by media company).

This is a good point that I do not have a solution to. I do see that "I think the internet should be a neutral platform", "I think that the internet should be run by private companies" and "I think that private companies should be free to decide who to do business with" is also a set of incompatible beliefs (that I personally hold). Thankfully, I do not need to have all the answers to point out the issue :)

The problem here is that you don't see the difference between the informal "should" from the first stance and the legal "should" from the third. You can't even say things like "the internet legally should X" because the internet is not a single entity that can be coerced to do X (yep, the legal talk all comes down to the issue of who should be coerced to do what).

Read Hayek BTW.

This is more an argument about the hearts and minds of the public on free speech. If people don't bring outrage to advertisers, corporations will remain neutral by default.

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