Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

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> There were no good choices for Cloudflare here

100%. To me this isn't really about KF (which clearly sucks and should be offline, but through actual legal processes), this is a matter of, "When does internet infrastructure end and content moderation begin?" As I mentioned in a previous discussion[0], Cloudflare finds itself right at the blurred edge of this line, made more complicated by CF providing both hosting, which is generally seen as content, and DDOS mitigation, which is more ambiguous.

The same people who cheer this decision wouldn't be happy if, say, DNS servers refused to resolve mega.io because it hosts illegal pornography. Or if their ISP started blocking PTP or nyaa.si for copyright infringement. This is to say nothing, of course, of any suspect political interference in internet infrastructure, which we already see around the world[1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32664488

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/22/pakistans-former-pm-khan-say...

On this topic of Cloudflare "finding itself right at the blurred edge of this line", people might find the Twitter account of Blake Reid--a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Boulder that works a lot on both network neutrality and section 230 issues--interesting (and not just this one thread I have linked to here).

https://twitter.com/blakereid/status/1565389791251746817

Related, an interesting apology by KF's operator: https://web.archive.org/web/20220819014610/https://madatthei...

That’s a apology in the sense of being an apologist, not in the sense of saying “I’m sorry.”

There were no good choices because they didn't think through their ethics in advance -- even given their history with other sites like Daily Stormer... They decided they were "just" an economic entity, not a moral one. Unethical use of the services was something that tainted the buyer, but not the seller, and besides, should they really take on the obligation to think about such difficult non-technical things when that could be pawned off on lawyers or politicians or something?

The moral actors in their vision of the world are the "end users" -- the specific individuals using a platform for morally questionable purposes -- and the "government/legal system" which should be doing more to stop them from doing so. Platforms are these magical things that only have technical, legal, and financial obligations, not moral or ethical ones.

I personally don't agree with that view. Any large company doing business faces various ethical challenges. Failure to grapple with them in a serious way means Cloudflare's ethical challenges lead to 'one off' band-aid solutions rather than building a platform upon which to build to handle future difficult decisions.

This is over until the next one, and nothing obvious was learned.

>100%. To me this isn't really about KF (which clearly sucks and should be offline, but through actual legal processes)

Agreed! The problem is that I am not seeing a way to get there. I also don't see any incentive for the legal system to change. In fact I think there are far-right elements who probably see the situation as a Good Thing.

What would the “legal process” look like?

I put Infowars forward, there has been an actual libel conviction, the perp openly lied in court and was called out by the judge and when it’s all said and done infowars will be doing the same thing and Alex Jones won’t be materially that much poorer, in fact some of the right wing media is calling it an assault on the first amendment and potentially going to market it. (I think it was Kirk on The First that I saw claiming that it was a liberal attack on the first amendment)

Complete and pure free expression seems like a concept for gentlemen and we are very much in a post-gentlemen US right now. I agree that there should be a legal process but by the time it can execute, kiwi farms will have morphed in to something new.

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