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Hosting and DDoS protection are different services. Think of them like a landlord (hosting) vs fire department (ddos) situation - one of them can morally refuse

by tauntz 4y ago

Hosting and DDoS protection are different services. Think of them like a landlord (hosting) vs fire department (ddos) situation - one of them can morally refuse their services to people that they think are doing wrong/illegal/immoral things, the other one doesn't. Not that I agree or disagree with this argument - just wanted to point out what their reasoning seems to be.

somesortofthing 4y ago
> Think of them like a landlord (hosting) vs fire department (ddos) situation This is kind of a ridiculous comparison. A real-world landlord is a private individual extracting rent from their tenants while a real-world fire department is a publicly funded institution with a duty to protect everyone. Cloudflare offers both its hosting and DDOS services as a private company. They aren't morally obligated to provide anything, regardless of whether the DDOS protection is offered for free.
- kube-system 4y ago
  This is totally orthogonal to your argument, but most fire departments are volunteer in the US (and a number of other countries).
- 015a 4y ago
  But that's the point! CF sees this aspect of the policy as acting like a public utility. Is that so wrong? Isn't that better than the alternative? Maybe, if we lived in a world where the government provided CDNs and DDoS mitigation and DNS zone file hosting and resolution and such, then its a reasonable argument to say: We have an entity beholden to Higher Laws which we can hold responsible, and marginalized voices have recourse when they're failed by private infrastructure. We don't live in that world, and its not on the radar. Sure, private companies aren't beholden to Free Speech laws. But maybe its better that some opt-in to a standard higher than "if Jassy hasn't had his coffee this morning we better have an extra on-call SRE". Or, more commonly: when deplatforming decisions are made either by a blackbox AI written by engineers who left 2 years ago, or Twitter outrage.
  - krainboltgreene 4y ago
    > But that's the point! CF sees this aspect of the policy as acting like a public utility. Cool, but they're not.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
yarrel 4y ago
They are both caching, which is hosting. We'll leave out that DDoS protection is a PII nightmare, and that CloudFlare is essentially spyware. For now. Their reasoning is the best that they could come up with under pressure. Which is to say - lol.
- ranger_danger 4y ago
  CloudFlare is no different than Amazon CloudFront, Akamai or many other CDN type providers. Where's the outrage for them? I don't understand all this hate directed at just one particular company that specifically acts fair to everyone.

by tauntz 4y ago

somesortofthing 4y ago

> Think of them like a landlord (hosting) vs fire department (ddos) situation This is kind of a ridiculous comparison. A real-world landlord is a private individual extracting rent from their tenants while a real-world fire department is a publicly funded institution with a duty to protect everyone. Cloudflare offers both its hosting and DDOS services as a private company. They aren't morally obligated to provide anything, regardless of whether the DDOS protection is offered for free.

kube-system 4y ago
This is totally orthogonal to your argument, but most fire departments are volunteer in the US (and a number of other countries).
015a 4y ago
But that's the point! CF sees this aspect of the policy as acting like a public utility. Is that so wrong? Isn't that better than the alternative? Maybe, if we lived in a world where the government provided CDNs and DDoS mitigation and DNS zone file hosting and resolution and such, then its a reasonable argument to say: We have an entity beholden to Higher Laws which we can hold responsible, and marginalized voices have recourse when they're failed by private infrastructure. We don't live in that world, and its not on the radar. Sure, private companies aren't beholden to Free Speech laws. But maybe its better that some opt-in to a standard higher than "if Jassy hasn't had his coffee this morning we better have an extra on-call SRE". Or, more commonly: when deplatforming decisions are made either by a blackbox AI written by engineers who left 2 years ago, or Twitter outrage.
- krainboltgreene 4y ago
  > But that's the point! CF sees this aspect of the policy as acting like a public utility. Cool, but they're not.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

yarrel 4y ago

They are both caching, which is hosting. We'll leave out that DDoS protection is a PII nightmare, and that CloudFlare is essentially spyware. For now. Their reasoning is the best that they could come up with under pressure. Which is to say - lol.

ranger_danger 4y ago
CloudFlare is no different than Amazon CloudFront, Akamai or many other CDN type providers. Where's the outrage for them? I don't understand all this hate directed at just one particular company that specifically acts fair to everyone.