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>“This was my decision. This is not Cloudflare’s general policy now, going forward,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Gizmodo. “I think we have to have a conv

by r721 9y ago

>“This was my decision. This is not Cloudflare’s general policy now, going forward,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Gizmodo. “I think we have to have a conversation over what part of the infrastructure stack is right to police content.” (from internal email) >Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company. http://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to-neo-nazi-site-1797915295 http://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to-...

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kazagistar 9y ago
So much for believing in "due process".
- bnjms 9y ago
  Much like free speech due process concerns citizens and their government rather than people and any public organization.
  - jlgaddis 9y ago
    Even when one explicitly calls it out as something they believe in?
  - zcombo432 9y ago
    He said so himself in May that every website deserves due process before taking it offline. “Whenever you have a private organization which is making what are essentially law enforcement decisions, that is a risk to due process. And I think due process is important,” Prince said in the interview.
    - thinkfurther 9y ago
      "Yup, they're Nazis". What more due process do you require?
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - noir_lord 9y ago
        There was a post on twitter earlier that said "Take your first name and your last name, that's your Nazi-fighting name". I asked "Actual Nazi's like National Socialists with a Eugenics campaign, or people we just don't like". Did not go well. We should be careful to a) not call everything Nazi and thereby dilute the effect b) call people are actual Nazi's whatever the fuck you want, they can all go die quietly for all I care.
        fiblye 9y ago
        Point A is something people don't realize they need to be careful with. The terms "racist" and "sexist" have been so overused and reduced to meaninglessness in the past few years, that true sexism and racism have been allowed to grow and become publicly visible. People can just brush off or even proudly own up to accusations because it's been so wrongly applied so often. "Nazi" used to be a thing that people used to call politicians they didn't like online. Now everyone is calling everybody a nazi everywhere. It'll get to a "Who cares if they're a nazi?" point pretty quickly.
        noir_lord 9y ago
        Yep and you lose (in a general sense) a convenient way of summarising a narrow and dangerous political ideology for a moments gratification in saying "Don't listen them, they are a Nazi". I don't call someone a Nazi unless they are literally a Nazi, I don't call them a Fascist unless they are literally a Fascist and I don't call them a Communist because they think that maybe corporations shouldn't have the game rigged in their favour and own the pitch. The part I really like is when I've been attacked by people with largely similar views to my own for sticking up for the rights of people to hold different views. If you think your argument is stronger, then make the damn argument, don't resort to name calling and lazy "but he's a Foo and we all know that Foo's can never be right, stupid Foo's". There are people on the hard-right in the UK I can't stand and there are some who have some valid points, you can accept the validity of some points without accepting the argument. Also while I'm venting, I fucking hate "what aboutism", "Foo's have been doing <bad things>" "yeah but what about what the Bars did"...yeah both Foo and Bar can be cunts at the same time, We are talking about Foo in this instance, lets get to Bar's later. My philosophy is "You have a right to think whatever you want, You don't have any rights to make me think it". I'd rather have reasonable debate over a wide range of issues than furious debate over a narrow spectrum as Chomsky warned about in Manufacturing Consent (I think, I need to re-read that book).
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    No. The 1st amendment is specific to the government, but free speech is a much broader normative concept. It is about cordoning off the market place of ideas from reprisals in meatspace. A canonical defense is John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (available free online).
    - dguaraglia 9y ago
      It might be a canonical concept, but it's not encoded in law.
      - lmm 9y ago
        Indeed. The law does not completely protect free speech; the first amendment prevents the federal government from infringing it, but it's up to us to defend it when it's threatened by other private citizens or organizations.
  - ruleabidinguser 9y ago
    Do you honestly believe this is a good argument?
- vacri 9y ago
  > So much for believing in "due process". Due process is not a synonym for don't do anything nor no consequences.
  - kgwgk 9y ago
    Due process is not a synonym for "I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet" either.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  Due process? For what? It's a private company, deciding to terminate the contract with a shitty customer that is ruining their image. Worst case scenario the Nazis might have a case for breach of contract, but they won't get much out of it. Also, I'd love to see them show up in court to try to defend this as a "freedom of speech" case, and get told what a bunch of abhorrent human beings they are and to GTFO.
  - leereeves 9y ago
    Due process is something the CloudFlare CEO mentioned believing in. I didn't see how it was relevant either.
  - maxlybbert 9y ago
    The CEO's explanation includes a section titled "freedom of speech < due process." But he defines "due process" as, roughly, predictable decision making. Legally speaking, due process involves a lot more than that. The CEO doesn't describe any process that Cloudflare intends to follow that will provide predictable decisions. So the original comment is correct: the explanation doesn't describe anything similar to due process, even though the CEO explicitly says that is/will be Cloudflare's guiding light. For what it's worth, I think Cloudflare has a strong argument for canceling based on the Daily Stormer's claim that Cloudflare supported them or endorsed them or whatever ( http://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-15-commerce-and-trade/15-usc-sect-1125.html http://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-15-commerce-and-trade/15-u... ). But the explanation promises to go beyond that, and doesn't deliver.
    - dguaraglia 9y ago
      Gotcha, when he said "due process" he didn't mean it in the legal sense, but in the "we have to follow the right procedures internally to make sure what we are doing is right" sense.
      - maxlybbert 9y ago
        Right. But I don't see where he describes those internal procedures. Basically, the post amounts to "we were upset that these guys claimed we supported them, so we canceled their account." There's a discussion about how important it is to not make decisions on a whim, but no discussion about how this decision wasn't made on a whim.
- specialist 9y ago
  His only mistake is explaining himself. If it were my call, every hate group's content would have inexplicable persistent problems. I'd use the Simple Sabotage Field Manual as my playbook.
  - vixen99 9y ago
    And the hate group would be defined as such by whom?
    - root_axis 9y ago
      Sometimes we yield idealism for the sake of pragmatism. Yes, the definition of "hate group" is subjective and also political, but most people recognize that self-described nazis and members of the KKK meet that definition.
RandVal30142 9y ago
Not sure why you are quoting earlier content instead of Cloudflare's statement on this particular matter. From today: >Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. 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. Seems no one woke up in a bad mood here.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  If eastdakota said it, it's damning, regardless of the later PR scrubbing.
  - RandVal30142 9y ago
    He also said this: >“I realized there was no way we were going to have that conversation with people calling us Nazis,” Prince said. “The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      Don't try to market yourself as critical Internet infrastructure if you're going to throw your principals away because someone made you feel icky. The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are okay, but this was the line? The worlds gone sideways. Edit: I was proud of Cloudflare not turning them off after their domain was deregistered. Now, so disappointed. Freedom of speech is rarely the speech we agree with. Or even speech we find palatable.
      - vkou 9y ago
        The Pirate Bay and Lizard Squad aren't an existential threat to our society. Neither is ISIS. Fascism and white supremacy is.
        9y ago
tuna-piano 9y ago
It's so bizarre. He tries to have it both ways. He says "no one should have that power", but then says he did it literally earlier that day. He says CloudFlare isn't changing their "content-neutral" policy... but clearly they did change that policy. I have many reasons to oppose nazis, including incredibly personal ones. That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated.
- jquery 9y ago
  "We had to destroy the village in order to save it" - US Officer, talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre
  - aaronbrethorst 9y ago
    Am I correct that you are equating a private company terminating its business relationship with an avowed neo-Nazi website with the U.S. military killing civilians?
    - abiox 9y ago
      As far as I can see, you are not correct.
      - wcummings 9y ago
        You must need glasses.
        sctb 9y ago
        We just asked you to stop violating the guidelines, so we've banned this account.
    - pharrington 9y ago
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
Couldn't he face personal liability in a civil lawsuit for monetary damages? Like if Daily Stormtrooper's hosting costs go up in a DDOS
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Obviously, absolutely not.
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    The site could, in theory, sue Cloudflare for failing to provide the services they paid for. That is, they could do so if they paid anything for the services they received (they didn't). And it's only if Cloudflare didn't have a "we reserve the right to discontinue services at any time for any reason at our sole discretion" clause in their ToS (they do).
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      Of course they can sue. Anybody can sue anybody else for whatever fancy they have. But that's not the same as winning that suit.
      - Spivak 9y ago
        There's no need to be pedantic here. When a layperson talks about the ability of one person to sue another they mean the high likelihood of winning said suit. We all know what the parent meant.
        jacquesm 9y ago
        > There's no need to be pedantic here. When a layperson talks about the ability of one person to sue another they mean the high likelihood of winning said suit. well, I'm a layperson and I would not interpret it that way. Suing someone is taking a gamble, and that gamble does not necessarily pay off. In this particular case the 'high likeihood of winning said suit' is not all that high. > We all know what the parent meant. You only speak for yourself and you definitely do not speak for me.
y7 9y ago
This is in a way much worse than if they actually changed their policy. With this precedent, it looks like what they're saying now is "we're not policing content, except for when our CEO feels like it". Basically this is a clear act of corruption, given their own proclaimed principles of content neutrality. That the ultimate trigger seems to have been that the removed site said something negative about CloudFlare is also worrying.
- jbooth 9y ago
  It's better than if they had reverse engineered the policy. Do it or don't do it, but either way, stand by your actions and get outta here with the mealy mouthed BS. IMHO.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    I feel like a lot of Supreme Court decisions are reverse engineered. I'm not sure that bell can be un-rung.
    - jbooth 9y ago
      That's different, the SC isn't an executive body. An executive changing policy and then throwing up their hands, "I have no choice, it's the policy!" is dishonest and doesn't fool anybody.
- deleted 9y ago
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- vacri 9y ago
  > 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. So basically Cloudflare are removing their services because of libellous statements by the client, not content. This isn't corruption, but Business As Usual. You fuck over your business partners, and they kick back.
- derefr 9y ago
  Is it corruption when a governor issues a pardon, or a president vetoes a bill? The point of an Executive is to be able to do act-utilitarian evaluations of context, while the organization itself is stuck following rule-utilitarianism.
outworlder 9y ago
Well, at least the CEO fully admits that it's an arbitrary decision. And indeed it is in his power to make. CloudFlare is not the only player in town, and that's far from censorship.
xkcd-sucks 9y ago
So what other arbitrary decisions has made that haven't attracted as much publicity?
slackingoff2017 9y ago
If he has the power to do such things then does it that is definitely HIS official policy going forward. Apparently company policy doesn't matter when you're the guy at the top, or at least that's what he's trying to tell us. Way to send a terrible message to your employees BTW. If he doesn't like your site and has a bad day he's going to take you off the internet.
- xorbyte 9y ago
  If he doesn't like your site, he may not allow you to use his service, which is something the TOS already cover. Over time, such capricious terminations could lead to the Board seeking action against the CEO, depending on the impact to the business.
  - maxlybbert 9y ago
    I'm no lawyer, but I seem to recall that a contract that allows one side to unilaterally withdraw for unspecified reasons is not a real contract (the legal term is "illusory promise" or "illusory contract"). Cloudflare apparently has a legal team, so I have to assume they know whether their terms of service are actually an enforceable contract, but that provision sounds fishy to me.
    - matt4077 9y ago
      > I seem to recall that a contract that allows one side to unilaterally withdraw for unspecified reasons is not a real contract I certainly hope you're wrong. Because I've "unilaterally withdrawn from" (i. e. "canceled") literally hundreds of contracts, and I don't remember ever giving a reason.
      - maxlybbert 9y ago
        Don't take my word for it: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/illusory_promise https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/illusory_promise . If Cloudflare can cancel the contract at the CEO's whim without needing to prove that the customer has somehow violated some terms of use, then Cloudflare isn't "bound to perform" using Cornell's terminology.
adventured 9y ago
I find it incredible that so many people here do not realize what inventing and enforcing a new, arbitrary hate speech category will enable politically over time. While simultaneously they're terrified of Trump, they're extremely eager to intentionally give him extraordinary new powers of speech control. Or is the plan to only give those speech control powers to politicians & authorities one agrees with? It's like all sanity and reasoning has left the building.
- jacalata 9y ago
  Trump is going to run Cloudflare? What?
  - adventured 9y ago
    > Trump is going to run Cloudflare? What? The debate is a wider cultural one, which ends in political action. That's how powerful changes to government are put into place. See: 1970s, or see: post 9/11. The issue isn't whether Cloudflare should be able to control the content on its network, that's a small, narrow, mostly settled debate. The very large issue is: is the culture shifting toward ending freedom of speech as we know it, in favor of controlled speech. That is the only debate that matters here, and it is occurring throughout this thread. The consequence of any further limitations put onto speech eg in regards to the Internet medium, is that the next version of Trump will use his FCC in horrific ways to silence counter speech. How do all the people here not understand this is the core issue? We just lived through a terrifying expansion of power post 9/11 because the culture became unduly scared, in which all the reasoning was fraudulent and solely used as a means to expand power. Now we have dozens of new power levers, increasingly abused by each administration. The single most important bastion of freedom to protect, is speech + press.
    - lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
      People don't "understand" because you're wrong (or at least, have no evidence of being right). Infact, what you argue for is a worse outcome than your conclusion, an outcome where individuals and businesses are forced to support speech they don't agree with, thus robbing them of their freedoms. Nothing is stopping you from self hosting what ever content you want. If you come to my machines, you play by my rules; simple as that.
larkeith 9y ago
This is excellent context to have. Thank you for providing it.
nyxtom 9y ago
People seem to be missing the entire substance of what he's getting at. That's why he mentions "no one should have that power". He even follows up about this in the blog. > Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online. People seem to be saying, "you can't have it both ways". I think the point is that without actually executing the point being made, it's just a theoretical idea, the fact that he did it in this way only proves the point of why we need a better framework.
- ecubed 9y ago
  Exactly! Extremely frustrating that the rest of the quote wasn't included. "Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power." His Gizmodo quotes are somewhat revealing as well: “We need to have a discussion around this, with clear rules and clear frameworks. My whims and those of Jeff [Bezos] and Larry [Page] and Satya [Nadella] and Mark [Zuckerberg], that shouldn’t be what determines what should be online,” he said. “I think the people who run The Daily Stormer are abhorrent. But again I don’t think my political decisions should determine who should and shouldn’t be on the internet.”
narrator 9y ago
I think what the subtext is is that he values free speech, but if he gets enough political pressure and threats he'll do what he has to to protect the company's bottom line on a case by case basis.
cmurf 9y ago
I think arbitrary is the wrong word, the correct word is subjective. The decision wasn't random, or capricious as is the denotation of arbitrary. But the decision was subjective in that it's based more on instinct, bias, opinion, feeling, than it is on something objective that can be articulated in a way that it's a reproducible judgement with different particulars. Added since I'm hitting a rate limiter: These white supremacist flare ups happen in the U.S. and there's no predicting how serious they are by casual observation. There is substantial evidence they want to establish a white ethno state, that is their stated goal and purpose. 1924, Democratic national convention, KKK tried to get their guy made the Democatic presidential nominee, it involved physical fist fights, hundreds of police had to break up the fight, it took over 100 rounds of ballots over two weeks to sort it out. The following year, 25,000 KKK in full regalia were marching on D.C. in broad daylight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1924_Democratic_National_Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1924_Democratic_National_Conve... 1934-1936 Nazis at Madison Square Garden http://mashable.com/2016/07/27/nazis-madison-square-garden/ http://mashable.com/2016/07/27/nazis-madison-square-garden/ 1984 there was a broad daylight armored trunk heist in California, $3 million bounty. Most of the money wasn't recovered but what was traced was found to be funding various Nazi organizations with the purpose of starting a civil war. One of those groups, The Order, had a hit list including Allan Berg a Denver journalist who was assassinated outside of his home, by Nazis. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-01-31/news/8501060684_1_fbi-agents-two-brinks-robbery http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-01-31/news/850106068... 2015 Charleston church shooting by Dylan Roof. And an FBI DHS assessment this year that finds again, among domestic extremists, they are most concerned about white supremacists. "White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat of Lethal Violence." https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3924852-White-Supremacist-Extremism-JIB.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3924852-White-Suprem...
calafrax 9y ago
> I think we have to have a conversation over what part of the infrastructure stack is right to police content how about no part of it? if the founders of the united states were able to create the world's most powerful nation without giving themselves the right to censor speech then why should any private company need the right to censor speech?

by r721 9y ago

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kazagistar 9y ago

So much for believing in "due process".

bnjms 9y ago
Much like free speech due process concerns citizens and their government rather than people and any public organization.
- jlgaddis 9y ago
  Even when one explicitly calls it out as something they believe in?
- zcombo432 9y ago
  He said so himself in May that every website deserves due process before taking it offline. “Whenever you have a private organization which is making what are essentially law enforcement decisions, that is a risk to due process. And I think due process is important,” Prince said in the interview.
  - thinkfurther 9y ago
    "Yup, they're Nazis". What more due process do you require?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - noir_lord 9y ago
      There was a post on twitter earlier that said "Take your first name and your last name, that's your Nazi-fighting name". I asked "Actual Nazi's like National Socialists with a Eugenics campaign, or people we just don't like". Did not go well. We should be careful to a) not call everything Nazi and thereby dilute the effect b) call people are actual Nazi's whatever the fuck you want, they can all go die quietly for all I care.
      - fiblye 9y ago
        Point A is something people don't realize they need to be careful with. The terms "racist" and "sexist" have been so overused and reduced to meaninglessness in the past few years, that true sexism and racism have been allowed to grow and become publicly visible. People can just brush off or even proudly own up to accusations because it's been so wrongly applied so often. "Nazi" used to be a thing that people used to call politicians they didn't like online. Now everyone is calling everybody a nazi everywhere. It'll get to a "Who cares if they're a nazi?" point pretty quickly.
        noir_lord 9y ago
        Yep and you lose (in a general sense) a convenient way of summarising a narrow and dangerous political ideology for a moments gratification in saying "Don't listen them, they are a Nazi". I don't call someone a Nazi unless they are literally a Nazi, I don't call them a Fascist unless they are literally a Fascist and I don't call them a Communist because they think that maybe corporations shouldn't have the game rigged in their favour and own the pitch. The part I really like is when I've been attacked by people with largely similar views to my own for sticking up for the rights of people to hold different views. If you think your argument is stronger, then make the damn argument, don't resort to name calling and lazy "but he's a Foo and we all know that Foo's can never be right, stupid Foo's". There are people on the hard-right in the UK I can't stand and there are some who have some valid points, you can accept the validity of some points without accepting the argument. Also while I'm venting, I fucking hate "what aboutism", "Foo's have been doing <bad things>" "yeah but what about what the Bars did"...yeah both Foo and Bar can be cunts at the same time, We are talking about Foo in this instance, lets get to Bar's later. My philosophy is "You have a right to think whatever you want, You don't have any rights to make me think it". I'd rather have reasonable debate over a wide range of issues than furious debate over a narrow spectrum as Chomsky warned about in Manufacturing Consent (I think, I need to re-read that book).
- jessriedel 9y ago
  No. The 1st amendment is specific to the government, but free speech is a much broader normative concept. It is about cordoning off the market place of ideas from reprisals in meatspace. A canonical defense is John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (available free online).
  - dguaraglia 9y ago
    It might be a canonical concept, but it's not encoded in law.
    - lmm 9y ago
      Indeed. The law does not completely protect free speech; the first amendment prevents the federal government from infringing it, but it's up to us to defend it when it's threatened by other private citizens or organizations.
- ruleabidinguser 9y ago
  Do you honestly believe this is a good argument?
vacri 9y ago
> So much for believing in "due process". Due process is not a synonym for don't do anything nor no consequences.
- kgwgk 9y ago
  Due process is not a synonym for "I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet" either.
dguaraglia 9y ago
Due process? For what? It's a private company, deciding to terminate the contract with a shitty customer that is ruining their image. Worst case scenario the Nazis might have a case for breach of contract, but they won't get much out of it. Also, I'd love to see them show up in court to try to defend this as a "freedom of speech" case, and get told what a bunch of abhorrent human beings they are and to GTFO.
- leereeves 9y ago
  Due process is something the CloudFlare CEO mentioned believing in. I didn't see how it was relevant either.
- maxlybbert 9y ago
  The CEO's explanation includes a section titled "freedom of speech < due process." But he defines "due process" as, roughly, predictable decision making. Legally speaking, due process involves a lot more than that. The CEO doesn't describe any process that Cloudflare intends to follow that will provide predictable decisions. So the original comment is correct: the explanation doesn't describe anything similar to due process, even though the CEO explicitly says that is/will be Cloudflare's guiding light. For what it's worth, I think Cloudflare has a strong argument for canceling based on the Daily Stormer's claim that Cloudflare supported them or endorsed them or whatever ( http://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-15-commerce-and-trade/15-usc-sect-1125.html http://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-15-commerce-and-trade/15-u... ). But the explanation promises to go beyond that, and doesn't deliver.
  - dguaraglia 9y ago
    Gotcha, when he said "due process" he didn't mean it in the legal sense, but in the "we have to follow the right procedures internally to make sure what we are doing is right" sense.
    - maxlybbert 9y ago
      Right. But I don't see where he describes those internal procedures. Basically, the post amounts to "we were upset that these guys claimed we supported them, so we canceled their account." There's a discussion about how important it is to not make decisions on a whim, but no discussion about how this decision wasn't made on a whim.
specialist 9y ago
His only mistake is explaining himself. If it were my call, every hate group's content would have inexplicable persistent problems. I'd use the Simple Sabotage Field Manual as my playbook.
- vixen99 9y ago
  And the hate group would be defined as such by whom?
  - root_axis 9y ago
    Sometimes we yield idealism for the sake of pragmatism. Yes, the definition of "hate group" is subjective and also political, but most people recognize that self-described nazis and members of the KKK meet that definition.

RandVal30142 9y ago

Not sure why you are quoting earlier content instead of Cloudflare's statement on this particular matter. From today: >Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. 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. Seems no one woke up in a bad mood here.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
If eastdakota said it, it's damning, regardless of the later PR scrubbing.
- RandVal30142 9y ago
  He also said this: >“I realized there was no way we were going to have that conversation with people calling us Nazis,” Prince said. “The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Don't try to market yourself as critical Internet infrastructure if you're going to throw your principals away because someone made you feel icky. The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are okay, but this was the line? The worlds gone sideways. Edit: I was proud of Cloudflare not turning them off after their domain was deregistered. Now, so disappointed. Freedom of speech is rarely the speech we agree with. Or even speech we find palatable.
    - vkou 9y ago
      The Pirate Bay and Lizard Squad aren't an existential threat to our society. Neither is ISIS. Fascism and white supremacy is.
      - 9y ago

tuna-piano 9y ago

It's so bizarre. He tries to have it both ways. He says "no one should have that power", but then says he did it literally earlier that day. He says CloudFlare isn't changing their "content-neutral" policy... but clearly they did change that policy. I have many reasons to oppose nazis, including incredibly personal ones. That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated.

jquery 9y ago
"We had to destroy the village in order to save it" - US Officer, talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre
- aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  Am I correct that you are equating a private company terminating its business relationship with an avowed neo-Nazi website with the U.S. military killing civilians?
  - abiox 9y ago
    As far as I can see, you are not correct.
    - wcummings 9y ago
      You must need glasses.
      - sctb 9y ago
        We just asked you to stop violating the guidelines, so we've banned this account.
  - pharrington 9y ago

ringaroundthetx 9y ago

Couldn't he face personal liability in a civil lawsuit for monetary damages? Like if Daily Stormtrooper's hosting costs go up in a DDOS

jacquesm 9y ago
Obviously, absolutely not.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  The site could, in theory, sue Cloudflare for failing to provide the services they paid for. That is, they could do so if they paid anything for the services they received (they didn't). And it's only if Cloudflare didn't have a "we reserve the right to discontinue services at any time for any reason at our sole discretion" clause in their ToS (they do).
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Of course they can sue. Anybody can sue anybody else for whatever fancy they have. But that's not the same as winning that suit.
    - Spivak 9y ago
      There's no need to be pedantic here. When a layperson talks about the ability of one person to sue another they mean the high likelihood of winning said suit. We all know what the parent meant.
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        > There's no need to be pedantic here. When a layperson talks about the ability of one person to sue another they mean the high likelihood of winning said suit. well, I'm a layperson and I would not interpret it that way. Suing someone is taking a gamble, and that gamble does not necessarily pay off. In this particular case the 'high likeihood of winning said suit' is not all that high. > We all know what the parent meant. You only speak for yourself and you definitely do not speak for me.

y7 9y ago

This is in a way much worse than if they actually changed their policy. With this precedent, it looks like what they're saying now is "we're not policing content, except for when our CEO feels like it". Basically this is a clear act of corruption, given their own proclaimed principles of content neutrality. That the ultimate trigger seems to have been that the removed site said something negative about CloudFlare is also worrying.

jbooth 9y ago
It's better than if they had reverse engineered the policy. Do it or don't do it, but either way, stand by your actions and get outta here with the mealy mouthed BS. IMHO.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  I feel like a lot of Supreme Court decisions are reverse engineered. I'm not sure that bell can be un-rung.
  - jbooth 9y ago
    That's different, the SC isn't an executive body. An executive changing policy and then throwing up their hands, "I have no choice, it's the policy!" is dishonest and doesn't fool anybody.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
vacri 9y ago
> 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. So basically Cloudflare are removing their services because of libellous statements by the client, not content. This isn't corruption, but Business As Usual. You fuck over your business partners, and they kick back.
derefr 9y ago
Is it corruption when a governor issues a pardon, or a president vetoes a bill? The point of an Executive is to be able to do act-utilitarian evaluations of context, while the organization itself is stuck following rule-utilitarianism.

outworlder 9y ago

Well, at least the CEO fully admits that it's an arbitrary decision. And indeed it is in his power to make. CloudFlare is not the only player in town, and that's far from censorship.

xkcd-sucks 9y ago

So what other arbitrary decisions has made that haven't attracted as much publicity?

slackingoff2017 9y ago

If he has the power to do such things then does it that is definitely HIS official policy going forward. Apparently company policy doesn't matter when you're the guy at the top, or at least that's what he's trying to tell us. Way to send a terrible message to your employees BTW. If he doesn't like your site and has a bad day he's going to take you off the internet.

xorbyte 9y ago
If he doesn't like your site, he may not allow you to use his service, which is something the TOS already cover. Over time, such capricious terminations could lead to the Board seeking action against the CEO, depending on the impact to the business.
- maxlybbert 9y ago
  I'm no lawyer, but I seem to recall that a contract that allows one side to unilaterally withdraw for unspecified reasons is not a real contract (the legal term is "illusory promise" or "illusory contract"). Cloudflare apparently has a legal team, so I have to assume they know whether their terms of service are actually an enforceable contract, but that provision sounds fishy to me.
  - matt4077 9y ago
    > I seem to recall that a contract that allows one side to unilaterally withdraw for unspecified reasons is not a real contract I certainly hope you're wrong. Because I've "unilaterally withdrawn from" (i. e. "canceled") literally hundreds of contracts, and I don't remember ever giving a reason.
    - maxlybbert 9y ago
      Don't take my word for it: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/illusory_promise https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/illusory_promise . If Cloudflare can cancel the contract at the CEO's whim without needing to prove that the customer has somehow violated some terms of use, then Cloudflare isn't "bound to perform" using Cornell's terminology.

adventured 9y ago

I find it incredible that so many people here do not realize what inventing and enforcing a new, arbitrary hate speech category will enable politically over time. While simultaneously they're terrified of Trump, they're extremely eager to intentionally give him extraordinary new powers of speech control. Or is the plan to only give those speech control powers to politicians & authorities one agrees with? It's like all sanity and reasoning has left the building.

jacalata 9y ago
Trump is going to run Cloudflare? What?
- adventured 9y ago
  > Trump is going to run Cloudflare? What? The debate is a wider cultural one, which ends in political action. That's how powerful changes to government are put into place. See: 1970s, or see: post 9/11. The issue isn't whether Cloudflare should be able to control the content on its network, that's a small, narrow, mostly settled debate. The very large issue is: is the culture shifting toward ending freedom of speech as we know it, in favor of controlled speech. That is the only debate that matters here, and it is occurring throughout this thread. The consequence of any further limitations put onto speech eg in regards to the Internet medium, is that the next version of Trump will use his FCC in horrific ways to silence counter speech. How do all the people here not understand this is the core issue? We just lived through a terrifying expansion of power post 9/11 because the culture became unduly scared, in which all the reasoning was fraudulent and solely used as a means to expand power. Now we have dozens of new power levers, increasingly abused by each administration. The single most important bastion of freedom to protect, is speech + press.
  - lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
    People don't "understand" because you're wrong (or at least, have no evidence of being right). Infact, what you argue for is a worse outcome than your conclusion, an outcome where individuals and businesses are forced to support speech they don't agree with, thus robbing them of their freedoms. Nothing is stopping you from self hosting what ever content you want. If you come to my machines, you play by my rules; simple as that.

larkeith 9y ago

This is excellent context to have. Thank you for providing it.

nyxtom 9y ago

People seem to be missing the entire substance of what he's getting at. That's why he mentions "no one should have that power". He even follows up about this in the blog. > Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online. People seem to be saying, "you can't have it both ways". I think the point is that without actually executing the point being made, it's just a theoretical idea, the fact that he did it in this way only proves the point of why we need a better framework.

ecubed 9y ago
Exactly! Extremely frustrating that the rest of the quote wasn't included. "Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power." His Gizmodo quotes are somewhat revealing as well: “We need to have a discussion around this, with clear rules and clear frameworks. My whims and those of Jeff [Bezos] and Larry [Page] and Satya [Nadella] and Mark [Zuckerberg], that shouldn’t be what determines what should be online,” he said. “I think the people who run The Daily Stormer are abhorrent. But again I don’t think my political decisions should determine who should and shouldn’t be on the internet.”

narrator 9y ago

I think what the subtext is is that he values free speech, but if he gets enough political pressure and threats he'll do what he has to to protect the company's bottom line on a case by case basis.

cmurf 9y ago

I think arbitrary is the wrong word, the correct word is subjective. The decision wasn't random, or capricious as is the denotation of arbitrary. But the decision was subjective in that it's based more on instinct, bias, opinion, feeling, than it is on something objective that can be articulated in a way that it's a reproducible judgement with different particulars. Added since I'm hitting a rate limiter: These white supremacist flare ups happen in the U.S. and there's no predicting how serious they are by casual observation. There is substantial evidence they want to establish a white ethno state, that is their stated goal and purpose. 1924, Democratic national convention, KKK tried to get their guy made the Democatic presidential nominee, it involved physical fist fights, hundreds of police had to break up the fight, it took over 100 rounds of ballots over two weeks to sort it out. The following year, 25,000 KKK in full regalia were marching on D.C. in broad daylight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1924_Democratic_National_Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1924_Democratic_National_Conve... 1934-1936 Nazis at Madison Square Garden http://mashable.com/2016/07/27/nazis-madison-square-garden/ http://mashable.com/2016/07/27/nazis-madison-square-garden/ 1984 there was a broad daylight armored trunk heist in California, $3 million bounty. Most of the money wasn't recovered but what was traced was found to be funding various Nazi organizations with the purpose of starting a civil war. One of those groups, The Order, had a hit list including Allan Berg a Denver journalist who was assassinated outside of his home, by Nazis. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-01-31/news/8501060684_1_fbi-agents-two-brinks-robbery http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-01-31/news/850106068... 2015 Charleston church shooting by Dylan Roof. And an FBI DHS assessment this year that finds again, among domestic extremists, they are most concerned about white supremacists. "White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat of Lethal Violence." https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3924852-White-Supremacist-Extremism-JIB.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3924852-White-Suprem...

calafrax 9y ago

> I think we have to have a conversation over what part of the infrastructure stack is right to police content how about no part of it? if the founders of the united states were able to create the world's most powerful nation without giving themselves the right to censor speech then why should any private company need the right to censor speech?