I’ve been seeing this confusion more and more recently, probably because of the size and omnipresence of corporations.
I don’t know if this confusion is deliberate to justify certain acts or simply ignorance, but the distinction has to be emphasized. Corporations and public services are completely different beasts, with different legislations, incentives, etc.
Not having the legal obligations of a utility, while acting like one (i.e., getting to pull the "neutrality" card in the face of public pressure to drop nazis) is not okay.
[1] because their business scales very well, so they'd prefer to be considered reliable, so that competition doesn't have that available as a differentiator; any attempt at applying content-dependent rules either uses lots of heuristic automation or is reactive in response to Twitter storms, neither of which is predictable and reliable
Isn't this what gets said everytime Twitter bans someone?
Cloudflare is allowed to offer services to people you don't like.
Nazis shouldn't get a website, even if the law permits it, and everyone has a moral obligation to fight fascism.
If you would restrict one then you restrict both. The freedom is absolute or it does not exist for anyone except the current favored group.
It's like laws on the treatment of prisoners of war - we don't have those rules because we love our enemy, it's because we want our brothers to not be tortured.
Thankfully, that's not true at all. About 16% of all sites use Cloudflare (80% of 20%)
“Cloudflare is used by 79.8% of all the websites whose reverse proxy service we know. This is 19.1% of all websites.”
https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cn-cloudflare
>This is not the same as saying "posting on Twitter is a civil right"
It's pretty much the same thing, yes.
In that they are both organizations made up of human beings providing important services to the general public, they are the similar. I think that's the similarity that was being emphasized by the analogy.
The analogy still works if you imagine private firefighters (the kind you might contract for a farming operation) instead of public firefighters.
An organization is more specific than a "group."
They both provide services to the general public, i.e. they are indiscriminant in who their clients are. This is different from, say, a corporate law firm that might decide to take just a handful of cases at a time and be selective about it.
And finally, their services are important, as in livelihood-saving. Of course, firefighters are sometimes life saving, so a better analogy would be firefighters working for agri-business, but "firefighters" still fits better than, say, "AMC theaters" because of the importance of the service offered.
A gas station has a moral obligation to sell gas without discriminating by race, etc. A gas station does not have a moral obligation to sell gas to arsonists.
I'd be suspicious if a gas station made a press release about how they'll sell gas to anyone but also donate to charity to "make things even". Sounds like they want arsonists to know where they can buy gas.
Something similar to basic Cloudflare but run as a public service by the government that is free to all might be a good thing to have. If there are majorly amoral actors that use it we should be going after them for their crimes (from a legal sense) which other parts of the government can of course aid with.
Until the government decides your content no longer deserves protection because of your politics or religion or whatever.
This is the same problem as government "regulating" social media companies and forcing them to publish certain kinds of speech against their will, which people also seem to want. Inevitably it boils down to an end-run around the First Amendment, as it gives government direct control over speech at a far greater scale than any corporation, backed up by a monopoly on violence.
Simply being popular is not having a de-facto monopoly.
Seeing how vital the Internet is for participation in society, it is my opinion that the baseline for "duty to serve" is that everyone has the right to a modicum of hosting and the ability to have their site accessible. That means a FQDN, SSL certificate, and network connectivity.
Should it be a legal requirement? I'm not yet convinced. But I don't think CF is wrong to host orgs they morally oppose.
Just don't justify whatever decision you make by conflating public and private services.
Do we consider stuff like DNS, BGP to be public service? I mean, Cloudflare can affect everyone who uses Internet.
Isn't it, though?
I see people are still desperately clinging to this "websites aren't public services" narrative but as the years go by it's becoming increasingly clear that it just isn't entirely true.
The whole logic behind the "it's a private space/service so they can deny service to whoever they want" argument is that, if a user is denied service, they can seek service from an alternative provider elsewhere, usually without much difficulty. If the other providers also don't want to provide the service, fair enough. But this isn't really the case in the modern web because you often don't have alternatives. If you are denied service by cloudflare, you can't just go to another cloudflare down the street. Same with many other major online services that are effectively monopolies in their field.
... Why not? Fastly, AWS, CDN77, Google, etc all still exist.
Even ignoring the fact that none of them have a free plan, they all cost significantly more than cloudflare's base paid plan and almost certainly provide less. I can't even see Fastly's prices without signing up.
Nope. Do we elect the board? Do they charge mandatory taxes in the currency only they can emit and will they have an armed force arest you if you don't pay?
> But this isn't really the case in the modern web because you often don't have alternatives.
Facebook and Google really are a monopoly in the West and that's a problem with must deal with. Cloudflare, thankfully, is far from being a monopoly anywhere but in our tech bubble.
Illinois has to allow the Nazis to march: they are the government.
You don't have to allow nazis into your private party, nor do you have to publish their books.
You, as an individual, and corporations as entities are emphatically not the government.
Per the existing law, but given the Constitution can be changed, should they have to allow? Arguing they have to because the law currently prevents them from doing otherwise seems a different argument than it being good for government to have such restrictions because the benefits are worth more than the detriments (or vice versa).
The US Government has laws in place like this because those were written as founding principles and interpreted in certain ways by our legal system over time. That's only it. But it's all calvinball in the end. Congress could strike the 1A from the constitution, or all our courts could start ruling against the 1A tomorrow. We're just making it up as we go. Now this would likely result in a mass uprising, but that's besides the point.
The only reason why this is a thing right now is because CloudFlare(a) is in a position to stop digital protection of Kiwi Farms (and thus force them to fully own the consequences of their speech), and (b) has explicitly chosen not to do anything about it, much to the chagrin of myself and a whole lot of other people. My belief, as is the belief of others, is that Kiwi Farms are violating their TOS and should be removed. That's it. CloudFlare, like Calvin when playing Calvinball, is deciding to make it up as they go, and we aren't happy about that.
> CloudFlare (a) is in a position to stop digital protection of Kiwi Farms
So too is Illinois to stop police protection of Nazi activists. I ask again, why SHOULD one organization protect speech and another shouldn't, given our agreement that any specific laws/amendments do not dictate what SHOULD happen?
Now that we've established that nothing matters, the reason is because a lot of us feel that Cloudflare should do something about it.
You personally find it ethical to systemically take a stance on the exact same speech in some situations and not in others for what you yourself describe as arbitrary and meaningless distinctions. Why?
The first point may be technically true but the second doesn't leave room for the possibility that CF might have a more absolutist approach to free speech in which case they find it more immoral to remove content/protections from one of their customers that the content itself. Since neither you nor I work at CF, we probably have to take them at their word in this press release. Trying to adjudicate what violates their TOS, what is immoral for them to do, or what is good/bad for their business from the outside is a foolish exercise.
There was a time the ACLU defended neo-nazis and it wasn't because they agreed with them. Just another aside, if you feel this strongly about CF, then don't patronize them if you are in the position to not have to use their services, but I'd avoid taking a moral stand only when its expedient to do so if you otherwise don't live with that level of conviction (presumably you didn't stay at Microsoft for 6 years because you aligned with them morally).
My position is this. That is not a good stance to take. And people should now use their wallet to influence Cloudflare's leadership to reconsider their extreme position. The small part I can play in that today is already underway, so it's not just words on hacker news, no.
Do you think people should vote with their wallet in regards to the ACLU? What about the idea of public defenders generally? Should society not be footing the bill to be provide legal defense to hate crime offenders/rapists/etc?
Your characterization that their position is extreme is also dishonest. It's been the MO for American citizens/corporations/institutions and ingrained in 20th/21st century American jurisprudence to take a neutral stance when it comes to providing a service or defending rights. It's, frankly, one of the last few admirable things about our society.
You can promote an activist mindset if you'd like, but you should also consider that your opinion is only shared by a vocal minority and the fracturing of commerce into parallel economies won't benefit you or the communities you care about the way you think it will. I'm not sure what I need from CF, but after reading your comments/opinions on the issue, I'm inclined to just order shit from them now.
Here is a more direct question: why is it a good idea for a company to exercise censorial power if the content is not otherwise illegal? Reminder that we are talking about companies that run infrastructure not something like Twitter that hide behind BS "community guidelines"
If counter protestors show up and shout over the Nazis, Illinois is not morally required to silence the counter protestors so the Nazis can speak.
And if Nazis want to gather on private land, Illinois is not morally required to force the private landowner to permit that.
The morality of equality is compromised by the practical execution of law. It’s legal for a cop to pull a gun and force you to the ground; it’s not legal for you to do that to me (or vice versa). So we place constraints on when the government can apply those special powers.
For what it's worth, you can't be just a little bit Nazi.
It's like poop in ice cream: if you have ten tons of ice cream and an ounce of poop, if you mix them together, you've just created ten tons of poop.
In that case your argument fails, because there are regulations for how much rat feces are permitted in processed food, and just FYI, it's NOT zero.
Islam is incompatible with tolerance. Women's rights, depictions of Muhammed, etc.
If we accept the paradox of tolerance you must either be anti-Islam or the paradox is broken.
The fix is not new and is older than the paradox of tolerance: your rights end where mine begin. You have a right to write and speak what you will - I have a right to not listen. I do not have a right to stop speech I find offensive. Islam has a right to exist and take offense, but it may not use violence or law to get it's way.
> I don’t know if this confusion is deliberate to justify certain acts or simply ignorance
Also, my guess is ignorance. Cloudflare is essentially restoring a platform on the internet that is difficult to get and keep for small creators. Their posts on this topic strike me as the super libertarian types who take no issue with privatizing public services.
I see more than one political group purposefully conflate this in order to push their own agendas.
For example, when a private company says that won't tolerate hate they claim "free speech" infringement but when government silences a critic they don't like it's "law and order."