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Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

Yes, yes, and UPS continues to deliver their banners and flags too.

Look, I'm all for businesses making the decision to cut them off. That means I'm also all for businesses making the decision to keep them on too. That's the beauty of a free market, is the government not telling you who you can and can't do business with. And, heaven forbid, the government telling you who you must do business with.

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> And, heaven forbid, the government telling you who you must do business with.

You mean like that whole Colorado cake baker fiasco?

Exactly like that. The bakers in that case offered to sell their potential customer an undecorated cake along with icing to use to write any message on the cake that they wanted. It should have been a much easier case for the bakers to win, since nobody should be able to make you say something that violates your ethics. Nobody should want that outcome, because one day the government will make them say something that violates their ethics.

What makes you mention the government here? Hacker news isn’t the government...

I mention it because this post is appealing to HN as if we have some kind of government power to influence whether cloudflare chooses to commerce with those customers. Clearly we do not. That power is exclusive to the government, and "you may choose your customers as long as it's not based on a protected class" is the overruling paradigm. (To the sibling comment disingenuously bringing up the bakery case: you'll note the key words - protected class).

So that aside, the post boils down to either "so what" or "we must do something to pressure cloudflare not to do this", neither option rising to the level of intellectual discourse I think appropriate for this platform.

If it is newsworthy when they are removed, it is also newsworthy when a company makes a decision not to remove them.

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