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Comment by potency | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare lost my support when they started de-platforming people for holding opinions they didn't agree with. Censorship outside of strictly legal bounds should not be tolerated from a company as powerful as Cloudflare.

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At least in some cases, those people were claiming that because they hadn't been removed, Cloudflare supported them. I don't see what other option Cloudflare had at that point.

Except that Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's CEO, made that up out of thin air. There's no point where Daily Stormer said that Cloudflare supported their ideology. There's no record of this on the Internet. Can't find it, because nobody at the site ever made such claims. Stormer was kicked off of dozens of domain registrars and registries (GoDaddy, Google, Namecheap, Dreamhost, several national cctlds) in the same period -- none of them had to come up with a fake excuse like "people will think we support their ideology". Cloudflare does do infrastructure plenty of pedophile and Islamic terrorist sites, so now we can assume that they actually do support those as they aren't removing them from the service.

Cloudflare also didn't even bother telling that lie anymore when the dozens of sites they censored afterwards including 8chan were systematically barred from basic commerce.

Is it censorship if they refuse their money for a service? Pretty sure that's just business. Are they stopping you having a website?

Yes, it is censorship. The entire history of First Amendment jurisprudence was set around the idea that powerful people were not allowed to stop political and religious speech. Marsh v. Alabama is a great example: a company town owned sidewalks that they didn't want religious prosyletizers on. The courts ruled that the fact that they owned the sidewalks and roads is irrelevant. For the entire history of my country powerful people were not allowed to buy up the public square and prevent the little guy from speaking. Everyone had a right to enumerate their grievances in a free and open marketplace of ideas. This has of course changed in the age of the Internet, where a bunch of scheming Stanford grads have bought up the courts, wrested control of the key Internet infrastructure away from the public who funded its creation, and sit there and grin as they take the role of arbiter over all speech on the Internet. The wealth and power disparity between the rich and poor is at its height, and it is clear that there will be no legal or democratic solution to the concentration of power in the hands of a handful of Silicon valley billionaires.

How is it censorship?, they're not stopping you publishing anything, they're just not helping you do it.

Would you be OK with your phone provider or imternet provider to stop doing business with because you said some unsavory thing to a friend or have blog supporting the wrong candidate?

Yes, because there's always another option.

I'd switch to an ISP that promised they'd take no money from Nazis

Why do you think you have a right to host with them? You don’t, you have a privilege that’s extended by them. You’re welcome to host your own thing somewhere else.

>You don’t

You don't now.

Why do successful technology companies have a right to have a proportionally large influence on the public political debate? Is it good for society to allow successful technology companies to have such a large degree of control over something so incredibly vital, merely because they were effective at running a particular type of business?

What sites have they de-platformed outside of legal bounds?

Daily Stormer, archive.ph, 8chan

> archive.ph

When/why did they remove that one? Have you got any source?

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