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Comment by AntonyGarand | Hacker News Reader

I recall this post[0] from cloudflare's CEO about when they terminated daily stormer back in 2017, and particularly this quote:

> Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network.

This is overall a very reasonable take and one I support from a player the size of Cloudflare: They should aim to remain as neutral as possible instead of enforcing arbitrary blocks on sites they disagree with.

Now, this post is from nearly 10 years go and I'm sure there have been many more cases that happened since then, their methodology likely did evolve, but I don't mind them protecting any site, regardless of their opinion towards its content.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031922

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Cloudflare isn't an impartial, neutral network. People need to stop perpetuating this fig leaf.

To the outside world, Cloudflare acts as a host. Their servers serve the content fo whatever site is in their "network". It doesn't matter that some of those sites are being partially pulled from other backend servers that are outside their network again. Cloudflare is their service provider and they are their customer (free or not).

This is especially true with all their hosted stuff now like Workers, R2, etc., but don't let that muddy the discussion. Even without that they cache and serve the content.

and that's been publicly posted since 2019, on their blog 2019-08-05

If they're providing content-neutral infrastructure I don't see why it matters whether that infrastructure technically counts as a network or not...

Kiwifarms back in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32706673

"Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems."

Bad example, that was clearly them yielding to a lynch mob in the performance of its duties, as the saying goes. They clearly would've been content neutral in that case too, if the mob hadn't turned against them too.

> yielding to a lynch mob

Reacting to public outcry by cutting off a legal stressor?

I just don't think it's that big a deal.

Being hosted on someone's private server is a privilege, not a right. As far as I know the host is legally responsible for the material they dispense.

In the abstract, I believe everybody should have access to web hosting. But upholding that mission is not the job of one private company.

Anyway, I guess "content-neutral" is an easier sell for most people than "We will 99 times out of 100 let you be even if you're pretty out-there, unless people start suing us about you and it's pretty plain to see you might be a degenerate force on the social internet, in which case yeah we'll tell you to beat it".

Like, it's not a power that should be exercised liberally. But be real. It's Kiwifarms. Businesses have a right to refuse service to recreational gangstalkers

cloudlfare is not hosting - they are DNS against ddos. Without internet or dns your hosting doesn't matter.

I know they have added additional services and you could say that they offer a type of hosting and domain names and other such stuff.. but generally when place get kicked from cloudflare, it is not their web host.

I would also say that they know pretty well when they kick someone from the dns protection that they are going to be bombarded with ddos and other issues that will take them offline more than likely.

Selling DDOS services is a lot more cut-and-dry than the daily stormer. This isn't a question of free speech, or hateful speech, etc. - this is advertising a blatantly illegal service that directly attacks both Cloudflare and their customers.

The article itself even says the tipping point for daily stormer was "the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology" which is hardly any sort of Due Process.

How would you differentiate the good and bad DDoS services?

There is a use case for buying them for testing purposes to apply on yourself, so it's not as cut-and-dry as you would expect.

Given the resources required, I'd expect a good DDOS service probably has a reputation in the industry, plausibly some sort of certifications, etc. - selling an easily mis-used service requires a lot of protections

Conversely, this site proudly advertises that it has zero "Know Your Customer" restrictions, bypasses Cloudflare protections, etc.

Quoting the site directly: "Some popular use cases are taking down competitor websites, creating unfair advantages in games and personal agendas."

Even their CYA disclaimers are flimsy: "We simply ask to only use our tools on infrastructure that you own or are permitted to attack."

Not "Require", "ask".

And that's diligence that Cloudflare would need to enforce on every single site they have?

This one is fairly obviously bad, but some will be more ambiguous, and I wouldn't expect Cloudflare to be the one policing them all.

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