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"Free Speech has absolutely been impinged by this decision." No, it hasn't. No one has a moral, legal, or ethical responsibility to pay for someone else's spee

by burnte 7y ago

"Free Speech has absolutely been impinged by this decision." No, it hasn't. No one has a moral, legal, or ethical responsibility to pay for someone else's speech. The government must tread lightly, but private individuals are under no compulsion to listen to others. 8chan is NOT having their speech rights infringed, they are simply having a business agreement terminated. They are still 100% free to create a website somewhere else, write a book, or protest in the streets. Do not confuse private property (Cloudflare's servers) with the public square.

Ajedi32 7y ago
The problem with that argument is that there's no such thing as a "public square" on the internet. Everything on the internet is controlled by a private company in some manner or another. Whether you're talking about DNS, cloud hosting, ISPs, CDNs, or CAs there are always going to be some number of privately controlled intermediaries with the means to censor your speech. For some of these entities, such as CDNs with enough infrastructure to stand up against large-scale DDOS attacks, there may only be a small number of viable options. What happens if all of those companies collectively decide to censor someone? You've effectively created a corporate oligarchy with the power to decide what sort of speech is and isn't allowed on the internet. Now again, maybe we're not quite at that point yet (after all, the Daily Stormer did eventually find a CDN that would take them), but we may very well be getting close. You also have to consider that even without a true oligopoly; there's still a chilling effect created when a large percentage of the internet's major infrastructure providers collectively decide to censor certain speech on the basis of ideology. At what point do you believe freedom of speech outweighs freedom of association? We've already decided freedom from racial discrimination trumps freedom of association, so it's not like this sort of thing would be entirely without precedent.
- themagician 7y ago
  Do you actually know what Cloudflare does? I'm not sure you quite understand what a CDN is. A CDN isn't necessary. It's a convenience for end users. You don't need a CDN to prevent DDoS. In fact having a CDN is probably the most expensive way to handle DDoS.
  - Ajedi32 7y ago
    CDNs protect against DDOS by distributing request handling over a wide geographical area, filtering suspicious requests, and caching responses to avoid hammering the origin server. Cloudflare offers all of that as a service: https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos/ https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos/ You can reduce the effectiveness of DDOS in other ways, but there's only so much you can do when you're limited to a few servers with limited bandwidth. Ultimately the only way to weather a large, brute force DDOS is by having enough capacity to service all incoming requests, which is something a CDN helps provide.
    - themagician 7y ago
      A CDN doesn’t actually help provide that for a website like 8chan. If the main server goes down, it goes down. Cloudflare will just cache old pages. 8chan wasn’t exactly designed for distributed architecture. Did you even ever use the site?
      - Ajedi32 7y ago
        Cloudflare does way more than just cache pages. As I said, they can also filter requests, even going so far in extreme cases as to use a captcha to validate that the one making the request is human before forwarding the request upstream to the origin server. I've never used 8Chan, but my understanding is that it's a simple forum site, like 4Chan. That seems at a cursory glance to be feasible to run in a distributed manner; though I guess it depends on how the application itself is architected. That's kinda irrelevant though, since as I just explained a well designed CDN like Cloudflare can remove a lot of the need for the site itself to implement a distributed infrastructure. (At least so long as DDOS is the cause of your scaling issue, and not legitimate traffic.)
- burnte 7y ago
  "The problem with that argument is that there's no such thing as a "public square" on the internet." There's also no public square in magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, libraries aren't required to stock your book, nor book stores, no one has to lease you space for a store, etc. You have the right to speak, no one has an obligation to listen or pay attention. No one has an obligation to help you speak, etc. That's what I mean when I said, "do not confuse public square with private property." Just because everyone watches TV and uses the internet does not mean anyone has a RIGHT to express themselves there.

by burnte 7y ago

Ajedi32 7y ago

The problem with that argument is that there's no such thing as a "public square" on the internet. Everything on the internet is controlled by a private company in some manner or another. Whether you're talking about DNS, cloud hosting, ISPs, CDNs, or CAs there are always going to be some number of privately controlled intermediaries with the means to censor your speech. For some of these entities, such as CDNs with enough infrastructure to stand up against large-scale DDOS attacks, there may only be a small number of viable options. What happens if all of those companies collectively decide to censor someone? You've effectively created a corporate oligarchy with the power to decide what sort of speech is and isn't allowed on the internet. Now again, maybe we're not quite at that point yet (after all, the Daily Stormer did eventually find a CDN that would take them), but we may very well be getting close. You also have to consider that even without a true oligopoly; there's still a chilling effect created when a large percentage of the internet's major infrastructure providers collectively decide to censor certain speech on the basis of ideology. At what point do you believe freedom of speech outweighs freedom of association? We've already decided freedom from racial discrimination trumps freedom of association, so it's not like this sort of thing would be entirely without precedent.

themagician 7y ago
Do you actually know what Cloudflare does? I'm not sure you quite understand what a CDN is. A CDN isn't necessary. It's a convenience for end users. You don't need a CDN to prevent DDoS. In fact having a CDN is probably the most expensive way to handle DDoS.
- Ajedi32 7y ago
  CDNs protect against DDOS by distributing request handling over a wide geographical area, filtering suspicious requests, and caching responses to avoid hammering the origin server. Cloudflare offers all of that as a service: https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos/ https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos/ You can reduce the effectiveness of DDOS in other ways, but there's only so much you can do when you're limited to a few servers with limited bandwidth. Ultimately the only way to weather a large, brute force DDOS is by having enough capacity to service all incoming requests, which is something a CDN helps provide.
  - themagician 7y ago
    A CDN doesn’t actually help provide that for a website like 8chan. If the main server goes down, it goes down. Cloudflare will just cache old pages. 8chan wasn’t exactly designed for distributed architecture. Did you even ever use the site?
    - Ajedi32 7y ago
      Cloudflare does way more than just cache pages. As I said, they can also filter requests, even going so far in extreme cases as to use a captcha to validate that the one making the request is human before forwarding the request upstream to the origin server. I've never used 8Chan, but my understanding is that it's a simple forum site, like 4Chan. That seems at a cursory glance to be feasible to run in a distributed manner; though I guess it depends on how the application itself is architected. That's kinda irrelevant though, since as I just explained a well designed CDN like Cloudflare can remove a lot of the need for the site itself to implement a distributed infrastructure. (At least so long as DDOS is the cause of your scaling issue, and not legitimate traffic.)
burnte 7y ago
"The problem with that argument is that there's no such thing as a "public square" on the internet." There's also no public square in magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, libraries aren't required to stock your book, nor book stores, no one has to lease you space for a store, etc. You have the right to speak, no one has an obligation to listen or pay attention. No one has an obligation to help you speak, etc. That's what I mean when I said, "do not confuse public square with private property." Just because everyone watches TV and uses the internet does not mean anyone has a RIGHT to express themselves there.