Cloudflare was purely acting out of market based fear, there wasn't a hint of moral impetus. Literally he said: "I don't want people saying they won't work with us" - which is giving into the mob.
Where is the ACLU on this?
We were all screaming for Net Neutrality just a couple years ago.
It's up to communities and governments to make decisions on content, it would actually help if the government made it illegal for CloudFlare to refuse service to someone so long as they were within certain guidelines, thereby absolving businesses of this issue.
Imagine literally the marketing and PR teams of Verizon, Facebook, Cloudflare, AWS, Google, your rando VPN provider, getting to decide if they 'think they might not like you' or not, it's just too much.
For marketplaces like AppStore, it's fine. But for other services, this is not going to work. It's not the job of your Telco or Garbage Pickup do decide if your public statements are cool/uncool enough for their Instagram.
> Cloudflare was purely acting out of market based fear, there wasn't a hint of moral impetus.
IIRC, the reason DailyStormer pissed off CloudFlare is because the users claimed (lied) about CloudFlare was somehow participating / sponsoring the site/activities. Sports teams have non-disparagement clauses; I don't see this as much different.
The only thing I'm not clear about is if it was just a rando user on DS that said the thing or some moderator/admin who can reasonably be said to represent the organization that runs the site.
Also, Macy's and Starbucks are allowed to deny their business to individuals at their discretion (subject to Equal Rights and Americans with Disabilities laws). Last I checked, being a Nazi is not a protected status (perhaps I'm wrong).
> We were all screaming for Net Neutrality just a couple years ago.
Different concept. This is about who a vendor chooses to allow as a customer. Common Carrier status is perhaps a closer comparison, but I think AT&T is allowed to drop a customer if they violate the AT&T ToS / contract.
Also, the CEO of CloudFlare went out of his way to publicize that this was a problem for the health of the internet and to start a conversation. Society didn't walk away from CloudFlare (eg. "vote with your feet/wallet") and Congress didn't choose to create any laws.
Citation for the CloudFlare / DailyStormer incident:
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
This is more about enforcing ToS and maintaining reputation than "an internet infrastructure company cancels DailyStormer because of their ideology".
The complicating factor is that CloudFlare was not the only internet infra company to drop them. DS were rapidly dropped or denied accounts from other companies during this news cycle, so they were effectively kept offline because none of the large infra companies they approached wanted to deal with the issue in a "free speech over all other concerns" kind of way.
> Common Carrier status is perhaps a closer comparison, but I think AT&T is allowed to drop a customer if they violate the AT&T ToS / contract.
That would make net neutrality meaningless, surely. Just put something in the ToS that says you agree not to actually use your internet service.
> Also, the CEO of CloudFlare went out of his way to publicize that this was a problem for the health of the internet and to start a conversation. Society didn't walk away from CloudFlare (eg. "vote with your feet/wallet") and Congress didn't choose to create any laws.
Which is exactly the problem. America has given up on free speech, and CloudFlare was a prime mover in that shift.
When they're speaking for themselves? Sure. When they're acting as a common carrier? No. It's too bad regulation hasn't kept up with the realities of how important the Internet is.
> Society didn't walk away from CloudFlare (eg. "vote with your feet/wallet") and Congress didn't choose to create any laws.
Neither of those things mean you did the right thing. It’s really easy to pick on a widely unpopular minority group and not get laws passed against you or lose a noticeable amount of customers.
> Neither of those things mean you did the right thing.
I find it hard to believe the right thing would involve either CloudFlare tolerating libel (my interpretation) about them by a customer or that we should always tolerate an unmitigated amount of free speech (at least the obviously political/religious speech originally envisioned) no matter the cost to {business, society, decency, morals, etc}.
What is "the right thing" to you in this situation?
Cloudflare was purely acting out of market based fear, there wasn't a hint of moral impetus. Literally he said: "I don't want people saying they won't work with us" - which is giving into the mob.
Where is the ACLU on this?
We were all screaming for Net Neutrality just a couple years ago.
It's up to communities and governments to make decisions on content, it would actually help if the government made it illegal for CloudFlare to refuse service to someone so long as they were within certain guidelines, thereby absolving businesses of this issue.
Imagine literally the marketing and PR teams of Verizon, Facebook, Cloudflare, AWS, Google, your rando VPN provider, getting to decide if they 'think they might not like you' or not, it's just too much.
For marketplaces like AppStore, it's fine. But for other services, this is not going to work. It's not the job of your Telco or Garbage Pickup do decide if your public statements are cool/uncool enough for their Instagram.