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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

"Neutral", maybe, but their stance goes beyond neutral. They clearly position themselves as "infrastructure". HNers should appreciate this more, as it's often a recurring theme here to talk about ISPs as infrastructure.

Infrastructure doesn't privately discriminate, period. Water/Electricity utilities don't cut the supply to rapists and terrorists just because they're rapists and terrorists. They cut it when law enforcement ask them to.

This conflicting discussion is better had on this level: "Should Cloudflare be considered infrastructure, or not?". It's not straightforward.

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> They clearly position themselves as "infrastructure". HNers should appreciate this more, as it's often a recurring theme here to talk about ISPs as infrastructure.

That's trying to have cake and eat it too. I am highly sympathetic to operating like infrastructure, and I would love to see regulatory bodies take this up as an issue to try and figure out. What I am not sympathetic to is having a documented history of not acting like a utility, but then puffing up chests and saying that they are a utility only when it happens to serve them.

Exactly. The distinction needs to be a very, very bright and clear line legally. If it's fuzzy, then the fuzziness will be pushed and pushed using plausible deniability.

> having a documented history of not acting like a utility

Elaborate, please?

From the blog post linked by the GGGP:

"In 2017, we terminated the neo-Nazi troll site The Daily Stormer. And in 2019, we terminated the conspiracy theory forum 8chan."

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...

The claim is that a "utility" does not cut off service for users who they disagree with. In the blog post, Cloudfare appears to claim that they will follow this standard in the future:

"Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again."

Regardless of whether they made the right decision here, this definitely feels like an abrupt 180 turn.

My reading of that blog post and this one is that they now think that cutting off service to the Daily Stormer and 8chan was the wrong call.

"While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action."

I mostly agree that is the claim that they are making. I already quoted the relevant part of the earlier blog, so here's the part from today's:

I say "mostly" because there is also the interpretation that they believe there were multiple appropriate actions in the earlier cases. I still feel it's a 180 turn from the earlier blog post, though. They set out a clear principle just last week, and already have found an exception that they neglected to mention.

Edit: This doesn't necessarily mean that their revised approach is wrong, just that it's a turnaround.

If they think those earlier decisions were the wrong call, then why haven't they rescinded them? There's no law that says that after you kick someone off your service, you can never invite them back on.

Having a higher bar for kicking someone off than inviting them on seems very reasonable to me, even if you think you made a mistake before.

Or it's inconsistent bs and they obviously know that bringing them back on would be a terrible publicity event, impacting bottom line

This rewrites history because there were active cases of inciting to violence on 8chan before they pulled the plug

If rapists and terrorists used their water or electrical service as a primary means to rape and terrorize, then those infrastructure services would find themselves feeling justified pressure to develop terms of service prohibiting that conduct, and to cut off the rapists and terrorists who violated those terms.

"Infrastructure" has the luxury of being value-neutral. Cloudflare wishes that were also true of it, frequently and publicly, to no avail.

> those infrastructure services would find themselves feeling justified pressure to develop terms of service prohibiting that conduct

I don't think you understand how infrastructure works or is regulated…

And yes, sometimes this is the case. Even now: Electricity providers are as guilty of keeping those forums online as Cloudflare is. Whatever your "primary means" is, electricity is just as needed as Cloudflare's services are (more, in fact). So… no, you're wrong, there's been zero pressure on the infra, because that pressure is not possible.

Law enforcement needs to intervene, period.

Your electrical service can and will be shut off if you use it in a way that the utility provider objects to. If you've never read the rules for your power company it might be enlightening, the ones for PG&E I just pulled up are dozens of pages and list lots of obligations the customer has.

ISPs will also shut you off if they feel like it, for example if you run a server or they otherwise object to what you're doing. CloudFlare already did this too - they have a history of cutting off sex workers who use their services.

> they have a history of cutting off sex workers who use their services

You are making irrelevant aspersions - they cut of sex workers because they are adhering to the US FOSTA laws: "We also terminate security services for content which is illegal in the United States — where Cloudflare is headquartered. This includes Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) as well as content subject to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)."

Right, and CF is arguing that something is incredibly dangerous or illegal about KF's content right now, so it's the same, no?

Cloudflare knowingly fronts many sites that violate FOSTA. They only cared when Switter made the press.

Cloudflare gave us no warning when they suspended our account.

What makes even less sense is that Cloudflare's Head of Sales emailed us offering their services when we mentioned we were getting DDOSed as an escort directory.

Perhaps “making the press” is one limit that legal council use to decide whether CloudFlare is knowingly (according to internal legal theory) breaking the FOSTA laws: i.e. that the legal liability exceeds their appetite for risk. Their exact internal rules for deciding to terminate a sex-worker site are unlikely to be published by CloudFlare, and it could depend on non-public correspondence sent to CloudFlare. “Knowingly” is very legally vague as per this article: https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-politics-of-section-2...

If they're so worried about FOSTA, it seems bad for their Head of Sales to offer services to an escort directory, no?

Cloudflare provides DDoS protection. Suppose there were arsonists repeatedly trying to burn down the house of some neo-nazi author. Then suppose a group of people with supposedly no association with the arsonists pressuring the local fire department to stop putting out arson fires for the evil neo-nazi. Does that not raise all sorts of alarm bells for you? Or are people on HN (and the general public) really that far gone?

Are airlines not a form of infrastructure? Because they make extra-legal decisions on banning customers, usually based on obnoxious behavior.

They’re also private infrastructure unlike water/power, which is the position that cloudflare is in.

I don't care for artificial binary categories. Thinking by analogy or by category always confuses the situation. Evaluate each unique situation on its on own idiosyncrasies from first principles and by studying the unique details.

I think what you’re saying is true for water and electricity, but if you were to talk about phone lines I’m not sure that argument holds anymore. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of phone numbers being disconnected for abusive behaviour.

> Water/Electricity utilities don't cut the supply to rapists and terrorists

These services are not typically used in the act of raping or terrorising someone.

Electricity isn't? And Cloudflare is?

> And Cloudflare is?

No, but it is (or was) used by kiwifarms which seems to be a platform dedicated to terrorising trans people.

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