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Comment by cassonmars | Hacker News Reader

For starters, these events are totally unrelated, and are a very strange false equivalence. Would be very curious to see more details of Tavis’ claim though. That being said, CF is still in the right for the stand they’re taking on not being a content regulator of their base internet utilities.

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Nothing better than claiming the perks of "being a utility provider" while bearing none of the burdens lol

If CF didn't offer free DDoS protection - ironically, whilst providing cover & protection to the greatest # of DDoS-4-hire websites on the clear-web - they would have nothing else to offer that would be considered best-in-class

But yeah, they're the preeminent force in ensuring free speech on the internet lol

I am all for a law compelling companies like CF to cooperate with LE and censor on behalf of the state if that is the will of the people. They are a utility provider that has not been expected by society to fund and administer a censorship operation. Go and vote if you think they should be compelled to censor.

lol inevitably, the "muh censorship" and the "muh 1FA rights!!!" comments are always the most entertaining, and least informed comments on these subjects

CF has *no power to censor anyone*

Refusing to provide FREE DDoS Protection, and refusing to FREELY CACHE vitriol, are not "censorship"!

Nor are either of those actions an infringement on any American's rights as defined by the 1st Amendment [friendly reminder that there are nations, other than America, in the world]

Sure - CF are not content moderators ... but, neither are they "a public utility provider" ... they are, however, a *for-profit commercial enterprise*, and as such, they get to choose who they DO, or DO NOT, do business with

If you think any of the sites offloaded by CF deserve the free DDoS protection and caching services CF was providing - by all means, spin up some servers and provide it to them yourself - you have that right.

I agree with some of what you said but even banning someone from say HN is censorship. It just means you prevent them from saying something, they can bypass your censorship or find a different platform but banning for the cause of restricting content is censorship even if the censored can still get services elsewhere. Also, for the utility part, neither are ISPs technically so by that it just means they want the same telco rules to apply to them.

Exactly. Providers have Freedom of Association, and I argue that everyone should have freedom _from_ being doxxed and harassed.

Unless I'm misunderstanding your idea, that sounds like it goes against the First Amendment.

lol plz see my reply to OP

That's why I said vote.

But not neccesarily, companies are not people they are not protected by the bill of rights and this is already happening when LE forcibly takeover domains to censor them with cause of course. Also, freedom of speech does not include speech made with thr intent and effect of causing demonstrable harm.

>That's why I said vote.

Constitutional amendments are so tricky that I'm not sure if just going out to vote is gonna change anything.

>Also, freedom of speech does not include speech made with thr intent and effect of causing demonstrable harm.

I don't think that is a legal standard for the First Amendment. Advocacy of violence is protected speech under the First Amendment.

States needs to ratify amendments so having enough state legislatures and laws to support the amendment is the best way. Having someone propose it at the fed level is the easy part.

I think they offer a lot of best in class services, have you used the enterprise tier or just the free tier?

A lot of their services, such as R2 storage, have literally no competition.

Hope the guy who down voted me enjoys paying 100-1000 times more to Amazon's egress racket!

not the one who downvoted you, but backblaze has similar pricing: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html

Backblaze also has free egress to Cloudflare. Which is very cost efficient.

Using this for significant amounts of non-html content will get your account disabled. They only allow it for R2.

> That being said, CF is still in the right for the stand they’re taking on not being a content regulator of their base internet utilities.

This is entirely unrelated to the issue of if they should stop offering their services to known Very Bad People. Nothing about current events with CF is related to regulating content.

It absolutely is about regulating content. Just because the content and the people that generate it are vile does not mean an internet backbone utility should play great internet censor about it. I say this as exactly the kind of person (trans) that the community in question loves to attack.

CF isn't a utility. KF is perfectly capable of operating on their own, without CF's products. This is strictly a matter of CF's desire to continue to do business with them. Their whole spiel on the blog post about how they're a utility is just dancing around the issue - they have no legal obligations that an actual utility does. It's an interesting discussion if they, and others like them, should be considered a utility. But that's neither here nor there because they aren't one.

I don’t think CF ever said they had a legal obligation and I don’t think they ever wanted to be perceived as if they do so I don’t think the reminder in your comment changes any stances. The fact of the matter is that people are mad because CF is protecting a site against digital vigilante justice instead of finding a better means to approach taking down KF.

As a company CF could deny service to KF but then it would be giving power to the vocal dissidents who could seemingly quiet any site they find disagreeable.

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