"We do not host the website" was always there response, while that is perhaps technically true, arguing if they shut down the reverse proxying for that website it would be at least offline, never worked.
And if this is about not-illegal-but-objectionable content, I'm actually glad that as an infrastructure company, they're choosing to not get into the business of content moderation.
Agreed. There's one other subset you didn't mention: "Clearly illegal but not yet handled in the court of law". Cloudflare again has a pretty hardline stance that "the courts need to come to us and force us to take it down"
"Hardline"? To me it seems like quite reasonable approach as opposed to "we will just take down anything someone on Twitter didn't like".
If you require a court ruling before blocking a fraud, it means you will keep hosting 99% of frauds.
I also doubt that Cloudflare lets every single analogous issue bubble up to a full court case every single time, but for new/unclear/borderline scenarios, I'm glad that courts don't get to outsource their duty, i.e. determining the legality of actions, to a for-profit organization without public oversight.
Isn't that somewhat of an oxymoron? What are some examples of something that is against the law but not handled by the courts of law?
If the legislature doesn't like the court's interpretation, they can then amend the law and the process restarts.
So basically, at least in the US, nothing is clearly illegal until it is handled by a court -- so yes I think you're right
So it sounds like the system works as intended, as far as I understand.