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My neighbor two houses down fired his lawn guy because the the lawn guy had both a Trump sticker and a Confederate flag license plate on his truck. My neighbor

My neighbor two houses down fired his lawn guy because the the lawn guy had both a Trump sticker and a Confederate flag license plate on his truck. My neighbor passed away last year but he was a 93 year old WWII vet who later became a chaplain and then even later became an atheist. He would occasionally invite me over to his garage to share a Yuengling whenever he saw me out working in my own yard. I asked him why his lawn was looking shaggy, and he proudly told me why. I miss that man. He didn’t want his neighbors thinking he associated with individuals who supported Trump and/or the Confederacy. I believe CF and other service providers have that same right.

newaccount2021 4y ago
jlawson 4y ago
Your neighbor's lawn guy can get work in many other places. But there is no comparable alternative to CloudFlare. Same with Twitter, Google, etc. An individual or small business cannot escape the influence of these companies and being censured by them is a huge and sometimes unbearable cost. That's the difference. It's the reason that if the random person who owns your local monopoly power/water/phone company doesn't like how you look, talk, or think, he can't cut you off services. Because if he can - if CloudFlare can - they gain massive unjustified influence over the discourse of our entire society. It is a massive disenfranchisement of huge segments of the population. The only reason you support it is because you don't like the people getting crushed under this boot of technological power, just as you don't like the lawn guy. If you liked them, you'd be up in arms over the injustice and the overreach of corporate power. Please try the basic basic exercise of, "What if someone else was targeted?", if you don't you have no principles, you only have friends and enemies.
- hollywood_court 4y ago
  I'm very familiar with being crushed under that boot. My wife made one FB post denouncing Trump and it cost me about $200k per year after a property management company dropped me from their preferred service provider list. It stung for a few weeks but them I recovered like I always do. I didn't get upset. She and I both know the cost of being a decent human here in the South. It isn't easy. I simply shrugged my shoulders and made a few calls and got on with two other property management companies. That company was well within their rights to drop me. Just like I am well within my rights to take as many of their clients with me as I possibly can and have. It makes things a bit more exciting.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    Okay, but in this case there is no where else for KF to turn to. The situation here would be analogous if every single property management company in the world dropped you (of which there are only a handful) and you were forced to set up your own business in a dark alleyway. That reasoning only works when the market is actually competitive.
    - hollywood_court 4y ago
      But if there are so many individuals or companies with distasteful views surely there would be enough of a demand to warrant someone setting up another company to serve them.
      - cowtools 4y ago
        It is not possible due to bureaucracy inherent in the design of the internet. It is like starting your own email provider- you need people to peer with you in order to make your infrastructure useful. If you set up your own email provider and gmail marks your emails as spam, then no one will use your email provider and you go out of business. Likewise, if you set up your internet infrastructure and no one peers with you, no one outside your network will be able to connect to your clients. Because the internet is broken and has no real defense against spam or DDoS, the only way to have load balancing is to have a big intermediary with a lot of bandwidth sit between all the traffic and discriminate. These spam prevention systems are trivial to bypass for those with the right political connections, this is why the internet is persistently weak. In order to stay online, you need to manage a political relationship with the gatekeepers like CF. The end game is that the capital-I "Internet" is fractured into separate autonomous systems (AS) as negotiations between them break down. This is basically the ultimate goal of chinese and russian internet censorship. This is why firewall-punching software like tor is important for freedom of speech: the alternative is the complete balkanization of the network. There is no real alternative to ICANN's DNS root. What are you going to do? tell people to use openNIC? Fat chance. Most people are not even aware of such a thing, let alone the existence of DNS itself. In order to have a domain name with ICANN, you must have a registrar who is on good terms with ICANN and pays the racketeering fee upstream to them. I am confident that there is no domain registrar other than CF that would be willing to hold KF's domain name. The only real option is to convince people to use a reverse-compatible system like Tor that breaks up these peering relationships and does away with racketeering schemes like DNS/PKI that sit on the wrong side of zooko triangle.
xdmr 4y ago
CF didn't just decide not to do business with a customer. They cut them off without notice in a way which they knew would cause service disruption to that customer, after having been paid to do just the opposite. CF in fact hijacked their domain so that everyone would know they had done this. They did this after keeping the customer on their platform for weeks (and presumably billing them) while they wrung their hands over the customer and contacted law enforcement about that customer, which was plenty of time for them to tell the customer they were closing the account and to migrate their domain off of CF and whatnot, if that was what they wanted to do. Imagine your neighbor had called out his Trump/Confederacy-endorsing lawn guy out for a job, then instead slashed his tires and told him "Well why don't you just push it home, you goddamn fascist?" I mean, sure, he's not entitled to an offer of work from your neighbor, and he can always get new tires. But somehow I still don't feel like your neighbor has done the right thing.

newaccount2021 4y ago

jlawson 4y ago

Your neighbor's lawn guy can get work in many other places. But there is no comparable alternative to CloudFlare. Same with Twitter, Google, etc. An individual or small business cannot escape the influence of these companies and being censured by them is a huge and sometimes unbearable cost. That's the difference. It's the reason that if the random person who owns your local monopoly power/water/phone company doesn't like how you look, talk, or think, he can't cut you off services. Because if he can - if CloudFlare can - they gain massive unjustified influence over the discourse of our entire society. It is a massive disenfranchisement of huge segments of the population. The only reason you support it is because you don't like the people getting crushed under this boot of technological power, just as you don't like the lawn guy. If you liked them, you'd be up in arms over the injustice and the overreach of corporate power. Please try the basic basic exercise of, "What if someone else was targeted?", if you don't you have no principles, you only have friends and enemies.

hollywood_court 4y ago
I'm very familiar with being crushed under that boot. My wife made one FB post denouncing Trump and it cost me about $200k per year after a property management company dropped me from their preferred service provider list. It stung for a few weeks but them I recovered like I always do. I didn't get upset. She and I both know the cost of being a decent human here in the South. It isn't easy. I simply shrugged my shoulders and made a few calls and got on with two other property management companies. That company was well within their rights to drop me. Just like I am well within my rights to take as many of their clients with me as I possibly can and have. It makes things a bit more exciting.
- cowtools 4y ago
  Okay, but in this case there is no where else for KF to turn to. The situation here would be analogous if every single property management company in the world dropped you (of which there are only a handful) and you were forced to set up your own business in a dark alleyway. That reasoning only works when the market is actually competitive.
  - hollywood_court 4y ago
    But if there are so many individuals or companies with distasteful views surely there would be enough of a demand to warrant someone setting up another company to serve them.
    - cowtools 4y ago
      It is not possible due to bureaucracy inherent in the design of the internet. It is like starting your own email provider- you need people to peer with you in order to make your infrastructure useful. If you set up your own email provider and gmail marks your emails as spam, then no one will use your email provider and you go out of business. Likewise, if you set up your internet infrastructure and no one peers with you, no one outside your network will be able to connect to your clients. Because the internet is broken and has no real defense against spam or DDoS, the only way to have load balancing is to have a big intermediary with a lot of bandwidth sit between all the traffic and discriminate. These spam prevention systems are trivial to bypass for those with the right political connections, this is why the internet is persistently weak. In order to stay online, you need to manage a political relationship with the gatekeepers like CF. The end game is that the capital-I "Internet" is fractured into separate autonomous systems (AS) as negotiations between them break down. This is basically the ultimate goal of chinese and russian internet censorship. This is why firewall-punching software like tor is important for freedom of speech: the alternative is the complete balkanization of the network. There is no real alternative to ICANN's DNS root. What are you going to do? tell people to use openNIC? Fat chance. Most people are not even aware of such a thing, let alone the existence of DNS itself. In order to have a domain name with ICANN, you must have a registrar who is on good terms with ICANN and pays the racketeering fee upstream to them. I am confident that there is no domain registrar other than CF that would be willing to hold KF's domain name. The only real option is to convince people to use a reverse-compatible system like Tor that breaks up these peering relationships and does away with racketeering schemes like DNS/PKI that sit on the wrong side of zooko triangle.

xdmr 4y ago

CF didn't just decide not to do business with a customer. They cut them off without notice in a way which they knew would cause service disruption to that customer, after having been paid to do just the opposite. CF in fact hijacked their domain so that everyone would know they had done this. They did this after keeping the customer on their platform for weeks (and presumably billing them) while they wrung their hands over the customer and contacted law enforcement about that customer, which was plenty of time for them to tell the customer they were closing the account and to migrate their domain off of CF and whatnot, if that was what they wanted to do. Imagine your neighbor had called out his Trump/Confederacy-endorsing lawn guy out for a job, then instead slashed his tires and told him "Well why don't you just push it home, you goddamn fascist?" I mean, sure, he's not entitled to an offer of work from your neighbor, and he can always get new tires. But somehow I still don't feel like your neighbor has done the right thing.