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Cloudflare is oddly political for an infrastructure provider. Every few months or so they seem to be forced to explain why they have decided to deplatform this or that website contrary to their no interference policy.

You don’t see AWS or Microsoft having the same frequency of these sorts of reports. What am I missing?

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It's the exact opposite. They try to be, and I believe are, the least political out of all networking infrastructure companies, so in the very rare cases where they do decide to deplatform (Daily Stormer, 8chan, and Kiwi Farms are the only three) it always makes huge press.

AWS or Azure doing the same wouldn't make news because they would immediately drop a site like Kiwi Farms, and anything like it, after the first report or two. If you're routinely kicking people out, people don't scrutinize you when you do it. To bastardize Stalin's quote: three deplatformings is a tragedy, thousands is a statistic.

Thanks, that makes sense.

Still, I don’t understand why Cloudflare goes out of its way to be a white knight when its peers have far less mercy. What’s in it for them? Companies at this scale remove the “don’t be evil” slogans they adopted when they were smaller.

If we take them at their word, it's ideological. They seem to be somewhat libertarian and believe they shouldn't interfere except for the most serious cases. If I recall, they've even stated that the 8chan/Daily Stormer decisions might not have been made today.

I recall some anger when Microsoft closed some GitHub repos. I think the diversification of these companies helps silo the scale of scandals.

Normal service providers normally remove violent/hate sites as a matter of course, which makes it not news. Cloudflare has set themselves up as a sort of refuge of last resort, for [redacted] reasons. Fill in the blank yourself.

The kinds of sites that need a refuge of last resort often have dedicated haters. Cloudflare can then monitor the patterns in DDoS attempts to better improve their enterprise services. It's a better picture of realistic attacks from motivated attackers than if they only hosted morally-acceptable sites.

You're missing that nobody makes a fuss about AWS removing things. Unsavory and/or illegal sites are removed from AWS every day for TOS violations - a somewhat recent and notable example was Parler, the extreme-right-wing Twitter clone that was used to plan the January 6th insurrection.

Sorry to hijack this discussion thread. I've come across your comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425379 and I think you have brought up some really good points what modern DBs should support. Especially, the queue support for atomic state changes and message sending can be a powerful primitive. I am currently looking into this area and would love to have a chat with you if you like. You can reach me via my twitter @stsffap.

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