Isn't it pretty normal to have an opinion on what companies or people do? I think Google should and should not do certain things, but my opinion is not enforceable in any way.

I don't think that's "ugly", and I don't think people are trying to supplant the role of actual courts?

> Would you find it reasonable for a law to force them to continue hosting this content?

Yes, at least in principle. Generally, I don't think companies should have any business deciding what their customers can say.

Now, if this site was sending threatening emails to Cloudflare employees, that would be a different discussion - I do believe that a company may have a right to protect its own employees from attacks. Though even here, requiring Cloudflare to go through some legal process where the senders have a chance to defend themselves before a neutral 3rd party would be a good thing.

In general, the principle I'm following is that companies should have minimal rights, and definitely minimal to 0 obligations, to police their customers' behavior, outside very specific niches (e.g. AML and KYC for banks are probably important enough).

Your experiment is the first interesting argument I've found in this whole accursed thread. As someone who gets triggered by child abuse, thinking about it forced my mind past the Cloudflare issue to what is my real issue, and the whole reason I take any interest in the KF situation in the first place. Because I can't bring myself to say Cloudflare should host your thought experiment, in spite of them not wanting to host it.

But as much as I hate it, and I do hate it, your example should be allowed to be on the capital-I Internet. Because the only reason this is an issue is that WE ourselves have long since lost our innocence / ignorance of pedophilia and fetishes, and we're imagining how they would see it, and it's nauseating. But like we always used to say, if you see something dirty it's because you have a dirty mind. And as much as it's sickening, what goes on in other people's minds and how they view the world, as long as it stays in the mind, is none of anyone's god damn business except their therapist and maybe their spouse, if they're interested.

If anybody thinks the girls are being abused, the site should be investigated by the FBI or equivalent. I have no idea but I hope to God there's a law somewhere that says the site owners can be convicted for their intended purpose, for example if there is no evidence that there's a legitimate explanation like pageantry (ugh) or fashion. Or if they're using a known porn payment processor, or if they require payment in BTC or something. But ultimately the law is the (changeable) law. Samantha Fox's mother put her in real softcore porn when she was 16 and it was shot, bought, and sold in the open, legally. Yup. Her mom.

But my issue that I'm trying to get to is this. The real problem is that it turns out that the Internet, from an architectural / engineering standpoint, ain't quite so amazing as we thought it was back in the 90's. It turns out the Internet can't route around shit, because way too much of its infrastructure is privately owned, and there may not be sufficient or well-written-enough legislation and regulation to prevent these private pieces of the network from acting unilaterally when they should not.

Here's an article another HNer posted the other day. It's called Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet, it's written by the admin and owner of Kiwi Farms, and it explains the problem way better. It also explains exactly why Josh won't back down for anything.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2021-10-28/where-sidewalk-end...

My interest in this, in addition to just as a concerned netizen, stems from my own attempt to solve a much harder version of Kiwi Farms' problem. I failed. Josh hasn't failed yet. I wouldn't stop rooting for him no matter WHAT was on his site, legally. All these people on a forum centered on internet tech, who can't see past doxing and swatting and think they're better people than those monsternaziterrorists, and meanwhile I have more respect for this Josh kid right now (I was online and coding before his parents met, probably) than anyone in this industry right now. I don't care about the content. I care about the censorship at the scope of the whole planetary Internet, as well as free speech in the U.S.

> Because it's their business, and they have the right to to choose what it is permitted to be used for. > Cloudflare is not a common carrier or public utility, not is it the kind of natural monopoly that would typically justify it being made such, and has the freedom to decide who to do business with, and what to allow their facilities to be used for, and is not obligated to only refuse unlawful business.

They also have the right to choose to keep doing business. We're not discussing what they must do, we are discussing what they should do.

They are well within their rights to both allow or deny service to KF or any other person or organization (at least barring some kind of court order). The GP demanded that they cut their business relationship with KF. I am arguing that they shouldn't do that.