3 ms·
I reread everything from OP, and everything from my post, and think I addressed it well enough. Both OP and many of the critics of Cloudflare are casting around
by glangdale 8y ago
I reread everything from OP, and everything from my post, and think I addressed it well enough. Both OP and many of the critics of Cloudflare are casting around, like the philosophical equivalent of a dog with a bucket on its head, hoping that the uninteresting question of "is there some magic neutral principle that will allow us to operate from day to day without making subjective moral decisions" (narrator: "there isn't") will be conveniently resolved with some appeal to local law, free speech absolutism, slippery slope fallacies, catchy Latin slogans, etc.
My stance here is that everyone has to make these subjective moral decisions all the time and that the hope that we can pull a neutral principle out of our ass and Resolve Everything is itself a moral decision and not exempt from moral criticism. It's just yet another value judgement: specifically in the Cloudflare case, it's that "the abstract neutral principle of free speech and the idea that companies shouldn't interfere with who they host" is more important than "maybe we shouldn't let those assholes from the Daily Stormer go about their business with impunity". I'm OK with you believing that if you want to, but it's just as much of a subjective moral decision to prioritize a quest for neutral principle over making your own ad hoc moral decisions (which you will wind up doing anyhow).
In short, it's subjectivity all the way down, so you may as well 'fight your corner'.
- avip 8y agoThe narrative CloudFlares' CEO used is: >"is it the right place for tech companies to be regulating the Internet... what I know is not the right answer is that a cabal of ten tech executives with names like Matthew, Mark, Jack, ... Jeff are the ones choosing what content goes online and what content doesn't go online." I'm not sure the dog-in-a-bucket analogy holds. He has a moral stance, but he's not sure he should be exercising it.
- glangdale 8y agoPhilosophically, he is a dog-in-a-bucket. Either be moral or don't; you don't get extra credit for agonizing a bit on the decision and suggesting that somewhere there might be some really good solution ("maybe there will be a broad multi-constituency committee of wise people who can decide for all of us who gets to be on the internet"?). I'm sure as a businessman he knows exactly what he's doing. Some Pilate-level hand-washing ("I don't want to make this judgement, you know") is just good business - you can blunt some of the criticism from the Free Speech Absolutists ("Hey guys, I'm uncomfortable too!") while also saying farewell to your least favorite customer, the Daily Stormer. Putting the criticism up is also pretty astute in this regard.