6 ms·

Sounds like OP is a casino and plays domain games to avoid regulatory interest. Recommend reading article carefully before reacting to the headline. Hopefully

Sounds like OP is a casino and plays domain games to avoid regulatory interest. Recommend reading article carefully before reacting to the headline. Hopefully Cloudflare provides a perspective.

beefnugs 2y ago
It is a good article, good to have practical details of how this goes down... but really an international casino cant afford more than $250 a month?
- fbdab103 2y ago
  Getting a demand to increase the payment by 40x is shocking no matter how much you make.
  - TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
    No sane company just goes “oh, that is fine. Must be that ‘ole inflation making times tough at $vendor, eh?” Not in response to the way Cloudflare came at them, anyway.
saagarjha 2y ago
I mean, sure, they’re probably doing some sketchy regulatory dodging or whatever. Which part of this can Cloudflare solve by having them pay $120k/year to them?
- user_7832 2y ago
  The part where Cloudflare is happy to turn a blind eye to any “issues” if they get their $$$, apparently
- smt88 2y ago
  Over-charging is a legal way to effectively deny service. When I'm offered jobs I don't want, I sometimes tell them my salary is 3x what I really need.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    I feel like you would probably consult with a lawyer before saying you’d do assassinations for 3x your salary needs ;)
- qaisjp 2y ago
  The post mentions BYOIP. I assume Cloudflare wanted OP on BYOIP to mitigate risk, and Cloudflare wanted them to pay for the privilege.
jmvoodoo 2y ago
But for $10k a month cloudflare is ok with that? Either it's acceptable or it's not, there is no way that this looks good for cloudflare either way.
- ajross 2y ago
  The point is more that the author is an unreliable narrator and you need to apply a little salt to the rest of the story. Cloudflare absolutely shouldn't be taking bribes to permit regulatory evasion. But if they are, I want more evidence than a substack post.
  - ksec 2y ago
    It also seems strange they dont know their Traffic Numbers. >Note that 80TB is the number they tried to sell us, I don’t know if it is accurate since they removed all our access to historical analytics. I mean you dont need accurate Data but surely most would know by heart their traffic in rough figures? Or am I the old dog where every new Web Dev are so used to Cloud and Serverless they have no idea what they are using?
    - CydeWeys 2y ago
      Eh, your traffic is a total cost you pay per month. That's how I would look at it. The one figure I know best of all is annual revenue, and how our annual revenue this year is on track to do compared to last year's. As far as exact volume of QPS or TB/month or whatever, I really couldn't say.
      - throwaway211 2y ago
        And here I am with a dashboard of anything taking more than 20ms and working knowledge of sales tax in 200 places around the world.
        Pengtuzi 2y ago
        Very impressive
Hikikomori 2y ago
How does paying $10k a month solve that?
- scrollaway 2y ago
  For $10k / mo paid 1 year in advance, your cloud provider does a legal review of the situation and figures out how to make your problem work on both the technical and legal level. It's not a "special plan", it's consulting. Edit: "How do you know?" -- I don't know it's actually what happened, but when switching to enterprise, you don't go from 10% margin to 98% margin. The added costs actually represent added budget for the provider to deal with your "special case". ALL enterprise pricing tiers are disguised consulting contracts.
  - Hikikomori 2y ago
    Or they had already decided to kick them out and tried to get some money out of them first.
  - atmosx 2y ago
    Great theory! The only questions that come to mind: how do you know? If that was the case why didn't they tell the customer?
- Tao3300 2y ago
  Nice place you got here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it. Except the "place" isn't Mom and Pop's bodega, it's a casino dodging countries blocking its main domain.
  - Hikikomori 2y ago
    Assuming that is what was happening, why would CF suddenly be okay with an illegal site if they pay more? Might as well call it the criminal enterprise plan then.
  - CyberDildonics 2y ago
    What are you trying to say here? You think extortion is ok if a country is trying to base itself where it is legal?
getlawgdon 2y ago
Hmm. My take is the casino structured its business to comply, not to evade interest. Further, I don't see how Cloudflare benefits by taking on the risk to charge more to help a customer avoid scrutiny. More like: they know it's a humming business and want a piece.
- Tao3300 2y ago
  Compliance: > We do have multiple domains that mostly act as mirrors to our main domain. We have these for a few reasons. One is that since we are a casino, we have different regulatory requirements we need to comply with in many countries. Evasion: > Another is that we use them to target different global user groups and affiliates and track conversions long-term. This also means that if a country DNS-blocks our main domain, a secondary domain may still be available. This is more like one gang hitting up another for "protection" payments. I had to laugh when they called it "Trust & Safety".
- J_tt 2y ago
  The way I read the screenshots of the emails from the articles seemed to suggest that something the authors company was doing was causing issues with IP reputation on CloudFlares range. Them very aggressively highlighting the BYO IP feature and then even suggesting third parties to rent IPs from strikes me as a significant detour from their normal “script” (having dealt with their AU sales team before).
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    this is exactly what is happening. Cloudflare uses an anycast network, so IPs are shared by default. this customer is damaging Cloudflare IP reputation which hurts other customers. Cloudflare can either fire the customer to protect other customers using Cloudflare IPs, or force this customer to use their own IPs and damage/manage their own IP reputation. unfortunately this is expensive and OP is mad they can't do their legally fraught gambling operation on Cloudflare's addresses for free
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
foolswisdom 2y ago
So the thing that stands out in the article, is that cloudflare's initial communications (and the final communications, when they moved to ban) implied issues with their behavior (trust and safety team, terms of service violations), but in between it sounds like the didn't talk about ToS at all, just sales team asking them to buy enterprise. Though it's possible OP is omitting some explanation given by as why enterprise plan would alleviate ToS issues.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
scrollaway 2y ago
Yeah, there's some pretty key info being left out. I don't doubt that Cloudflare communication sucks especially when dealing with their sales team (aka bizdev which is what OP was originally contacted by), but the second screenshot is pretty damning. My guess: Their account fell out of the non-enterprise TOS for some reason which is being obscured in the post (probably domain rotation related). Their T&S team proposed moving to enterprise for a custom resolution. OP's company refused, their account was purged because they had gotten several warnings about it. I'm sure this sounds frustrating to the average HN dev who runs a legitimate startup with cloudflare on top and is now biting their nails worried to death about what will happen to them. But "online casino" immediately raised a million alarm bells in the post.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  And the part where they offered to remove the secondary domains and couldn't get an answer?
- nolverostae 2y ago
  I did mention the multiple-domains issue in the post. It would not have been amazing for us to remove our secondary domains, but we would have been very happy to do it if it had resolved the issue. We asked them again and again but they would not give us any detail or options apart from their 120k/year package. Note that BYOIP (which I guess they could reasonably have required to isolate us even if we only use a single domain) is available for a fraction of the cost elswhere (e.g. fastly). Since we already left Cloudflare the only reason I finished writing this article is to warn others. I think it's still relevant to many companies regardless of what you think of casinos, since very unprofessional sales tactics (unprofessional as in business threatening) seem common place with them. Do look at the linked other posts and comments here from other people affected that don't have anything to do with casinos. I'm happy to answer questions as well.
  - Chyzwar 2y ago
    For me, the worst part is blackmail and account ban. If you had legal presence in EU then new Digital Services Act[1] might a help for you. I am not sure if you could sue them based on that law, but you could maybe lodge a complaint. https://www.wolftheiss.com/insights/digital-service-act-explained-new-obligations-for-online-businesses-and-other-digital-services/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/digital-services-act
lightedman 2y ago
"Now this needs a bit of context on what they are talking about. We do have multiple domains that mostly act as mirrors to our main domain. We have these for a few reasons. One is that since we are a casino, we have different regulatory requirements we need to comply with in many countries. For example, many games are only available in some countries. Some countries we block completely. Then we have a few different domains that remove certain game groups or site features - for example our social features (chat, user tipping / interaction) or our sportsbook. Another is that we use them to target different global user groups and affiliates and track conversions long-term. This also means that if a country DNS-blocks our main domain, a secondary domain may still be available. This could arguably be seen as a violation of the Cloudflare TOS, as they wrote above." Looks like they COMPLY with regulatory interest, to me.
- scrollaway 2y ago
  When it comes to laws and taxes, "comply" and "evade" tend to be synonyms. "In order to comply with tax regulations and donor laws, we had to structure our activities in order to make it possible for political donations to be classified as regular consulting income".
  - sersi 2y ago
    At least from discussions I've had over the years with my accountants, comply and evade are very different. Evasion is when you are doing something that's explicitly illegal. Optimization and compliance is when you comply with the law while trying as much as possible to reduce your tax. In some cases, there's a bit of a grey area where you use multiple structures that according to your accountant should comply with the law but in a way that has never actually been tested legally. That last part tends to be named "optimization" rather than "compliance"
    - TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
      This is in part why good laws are more concerned with what “it” is rather than what “it” is called. Good laws define something and then name it, so that you can test a pattern of facts and determine whether “it” is indeed what the law covers. For me, my corporate tax professional errs on the side of well tested strategies or those that the IRS has ruled on administratively, and that is perfect for my risk tolerance.
ksec 2y ago
>Hopefully Cloudflare provides a perspective. Well HN is the unofficially official Cloudflare Support forum. I think we will hear from them soon. From past experience normally their response time for anything Cloudflare on HN is within 2-3 hours.
chadsix 2y ago
If that's the take, that means Cloudflare is okay with 'breaking laws' so long as they can take a heavy cut of the ill gotten gains? </sarcasm> Let's not try to find reasons to harm the messenger and stick to the facts -- a paying customer was suddenly extorted for hundreds of thousand of dollars out of nowhere.
rvnx 2y ago
Taking a step back, why would they even care if their platform is supposedly neutral and not responsible for the content ? If they can indeed stop providing services to a casino, why cannot they shutdown a website spreading pro-war propaganda, or a website selling illegal services ? It means they are making editorial choices, instead of just being the technological provider and being a neutral "internet pipe". Not sure it's really in their best interest to self-police in the end, as they could lose their DMCA safe harbor provision ?
- chadsix 2y ago
  > Not sure it's really in their best interest to self-police in the end, as they could lose their DMCA safe harbor provision ? This. That said, we're seeing this across so many platforms, from datacenters to social network sites. They blew their safe harbor provisions years ago and yet remain untouched despite this.
  - zbentley 2y ago
    It’s not “editorial” to choose to stop serving (or charge more money to) a customer whose actions pose legal difficulties or risks to your business. If some country’s vice division contacts cloudflare legal due to a customer’s illegal online gambling presence, I guarantee that cop does not care about a US/EU copyright law. The same thing is true for IP reputation, just without an external official complaining. If other CF customers are negatively impacted by one customer’s action, CF isn’t violating safe harbor by booting that customer or passing on the costs of mitigating that impact. That’s just running a business, not exercising editorial review of hosted content in violation of safe harbor provisions.
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  > Taking a step back, why would they even care if their platform is supposedly neutral and not responsible for the content ? Because their main network all uses one big IP address pool and the blocks by various regions/countries against their site were probably not just DNS blocks but also IP address blocks. So they now have an account whose activity is getting their IPs banned in countries where they operate. So they told the account owners they needed to pay for an enterprise account and a dedicated IP address pool maintained by cloudflare. That's why CF kept talking about BYOIP in the emails. i.e. "Pay for us to build you a quarantine with your own IP pool or leave ASAP"
nolverostae 2y ago
I do encourage you to read the whole article cause there is some fine details in there. The main point is that we were happy to remove any domains apart from our main domain (which gets > 95% of our traffic) but Cloudflare did not give us that option or any other detail on the supposed issue.
xnx 2y ago
This has been my experience with 80+% of these loud complaints about services, especially regarding "losing Google traffic". Dig into it just a little and you find out the complainer was doing something extremely shady that the service is often too polite/proper to call out in a public forum.
user_7832 2y ago
If 90 or 95% of their traffic comes from a single domain (and presumably has for a while), that still doesn’t make OP sound guilty. If there was a legal issue Cloudflare legal should’ve stepped in, not their sales team.
- Tao3300 2y ago
  That was the part that bugged me. This workflow is very busted from a user standpoint, though I'm sure it works very nicely to Cloudflare! It smells like the "problem" was detected by automation, but instead of being able to reach anyone technical to work through it, you can only call sales teams. In my opinion it's one racket vs another.
kosolam 2y ago
Obviously you work for CF. I did read the full post.
foundry27 2y ago
Using localized versions of your services to comply with regional laws and enhance user experiences (i.e. make money) is SOP for practically every international $bigco. Online gambling is regulated and legal in ~50%-70% of the world; without actual evidence to the contrary, it’s completely reasonable to assume that this is a legitimate business. I’m really struggling to agree with the “two sides to every story” replies being left here about how there’s likely shady activity going on behind the scenes, when to me the post read as candid and transparent about the nature of the nature of the business, the admitted legitimacy of CF’s TOS violation claims against them, and the content of the communications with CF. My 2c: It’s scummy that CF did this. It looks like they were disingenuous about the severity of the violations and used it as an excuse to get more $$$ from an already paying customer to make the manufactured problem go away.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mardifoufs 2y ago
This is literal theory crafting lol. CloudFlare never said or implied that in their emails, yet you seem to know more than the CF reps themselves?
ndiddy 2y ago
This shouldn't matter, in general Cloudflare responds to complaints about allowing illegal content with "we're a neutral utility, we forwarded your complaint to the site's webhost". To me, the article showed that Cloudflare was being extremely aggressive with selling the customer on an enterprise plan and repeatedly invented excuses to get them on the phone with their sales team. They then took the site offline and locked them out of their account when the customer started talking with other CDNs.
kaliqt 2y ago
Nah, you have different domains so you can track and maintain flows, also the regulations might even stipulate having domains in the locale, the headline is very much accurate after reading the article.
supriyo-biswas 2y ago
Is the casino illegal in the jurisdiction they're based out of? It doesn't seem so, so there is at least a valid reason for Cloudflare to keep them as a customer as they're not violating the laws where they have their business in.
pclmulqdq 2y ago
With a casino, the issue isn't just domains, it's also IPs. That's why they pushed BYOIP so heavily.
csomar 2y ago
Except Cloudflare position here is not to ban them but they want to get paid for it. You are shaming the OP and his business but the reality is that Cloudflare has acted in a worse manner and that should be highlighted.

Sounds like OP is a casino and plays domain games to avoid regulatory interest. Recommend reading article carefully before reacting to the headline. Hopefully Cloudflare provides a perspective.

beefnugs 2y ago

It is a good article, good to have practical details of how this goes down... but really an international casino cant afford more than $250 a month?

fbdab103 2y ago
Getting a demand to increase the payment by 40x is shocking no matter how much you make.
- TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
  No sane company just goes “oh, that is fine. Must be that ‘ole inflation making times tough at $vendor, eh?” Not in response to the way Cloudflare came at them, anyway.

saagarjha 2y ago

I mean, sure, they’re probably doing some sketchy regulatory dodging or whatever. Which part of this can Cloudflare solve by having them pay $120k/year to them?

user_7832 2y ago
The part where Cloudflare is happy to turn a blind eye to any “issues” if they get their $$$, apparently
smt88 2y ago
Over-charging is a legal way to effectively deny service. When I'm offered jobs I don't want, I sometimes tell them my salary is 3x what I really need.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  I feel like you would probably consult with a lawyer before saying you’d do assassinations for 3x your salary needs ;)
qaisjp 2y ago
The post mentions BYOIP. I assume Cloudflare wanted OP on BYOIP to mitigate risk, and Cloudflare wanted them to pay for the privilege.

jmvoodoo 2y ago

But for $10k a month cloudflare is ok with that? Either it's acceptable or it's not, there is no way that this looks good for cloudflare either way.

ajross 2y ago
The point is more that the author is an unreliable narrator and you need to apply a little salt to the rest of the story. Cloudflare absolutely shouldn't be taking bribes to permit regulatory evasion. But if they are, I want more evidence than a substack post.
- ksec 2y ago
  It also seems strange they dont know their Traffic Numbers. >Note that 80TB is the number they tried to sell us, I don’t know if it is accurate since they removed all our access to historical analytics. I mean you dont need accurate Data but surely most would know by heart their traffic in rough figures? Or am I the old dog where every new Web Dev are so used to Cloud and Serverless they have no idea what they are using?
  - CydeWeys 2y ago
    Eh, your traffic is a total cost you pay per month. That's how I would look at it. The one figure I know best of all is annual revenue, and how our annual revenue this year is on track to do compared to last year's. As far as exact volume of QPS or TB/month or whatever, I really couldn't say.
    - throwaway211 2y ago
      And here I am with a dashboard of anything taking more than 20ms and working knowledge of sales tax in 200 places around the world.
      - Pengtuzi 2y ago
        Very impressive

Hikikomori 2y ago

How does paying $10k a month solve that?

scrollaway 2y ago
For $10k / mo paid 1 year in advance, your cloud provider does a legal review of the situation and figures out how to make your problem work on both the technical and legal level. It's not a "special plan", it's consulting. Edit: "How do you know?" -- I don't know it's actually what happened, but when switching to enterprise, you don't go from 10% margin to 98% margin. The added costs actually represent added budget for the provider to deal with your "special case". ALL enterprise pricing tiers are disguised consulting contracts.
- Hikikomori 2y ago
  Or they had already decided to kick them out and tried to get some money out of them first.
- atmosx 2y ago
  Great theory! The only questions that come to mind: how do you know? If that was the case why didn't they tell the customer?
Tao3300 2y ago
Nice place you got here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it. Except the "place" isn't Mom and Pop's bodega, it's a casino dodging countries blocking its main domain.
- Hikikomori 2y ago
  Assuming that is what was happening, why would CF suddenly be okay with an illegal site if they pay more? Might as well call it the criminal enterprise plan then.
- CyberDildonics 2y ago
  What are you trying to say here? You think extortion is ok if a country is trying to base itself where it is legal?

getlawgdon 2y ago

Hmm. My take is the casino structured its business to comply, not to evade interest. Further, I don't see how Cloudflare benefits by taking on the risk to charge more to help a customer avoid scrutiny. More like: they know it's a humming business and want a piece.

Tao3300 2y ago
Compliance: > We do have multiple domains that mostly act as mirrors to our main domain. We have these for a few reasons. One is that since we are a casino, we have different regulatory requirements we need to comply with in many countries. Evasion: > Another is that we use them to target different global user groups and affiliates and track conversions long-term. This also means that if a country DNS-blocks our main domain, a secondary domain may still be available. This is more like one gang hitting up another for "protection" payments. I had to laugh when they called it "Trust & Safety".
J_tt 2y ago
The way I read the screenshots of the emails from the articles seemed to suggest that something the authors company was doing was causing issues with IP reputation on CloudFlares range. Them very aggressively highlighting the BYO IP feature and then even suggesting third parties to rent IPs from strikes me as a significant detour from their normal “script” (having dealt with their AU sales team before).
- dingnuts 2y ago
  this is exactly what is happening. Cloudflare uses an anycast network, so IPs are shared by default. this customer is damaging Cloudflare IP reputation which hurts other customers. Cloudflare can either fire the customer to protect other customers using Cloudflare IPs, or force this customer to use their own IPs and damage/manage their own IP reputation. unfortunately this is expensive and OP is mad they can't do their legally fraught gambling operation on Cloudflare's addresses for free
  - Dylan16807 2y ago

foolswisdom 2y ago

So the thing that stands out in the article, is that cloudflare's initial communications (and the final communications, when they moved to ban) implied issues with their behavior (trust and safety team, terms of service violations), but in between it sounds like the didn't talk about ToS at all, just sales team asking them to buy enterprise. Though it's possible OP is omitting some explanation given by as why enterprise plan would alleviate ToS issues.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

scrollaway 2y ago

Yeah, there's some pretty key info being left out. I don't doubt that Cloudflare communication sucks especially when dealing with their sales team (aka bizdev which is what OP was originally contacted by), but the second screenshot is pretty damning. My guess: Their account fell out of the non-enterprise TOS for some reason which is being obscured in the post (probably domain rotation related). Their T&S team proposed moving to enterprise for a custom resolution. OP's company refused, their account was purged because they had gotten several warnings about it. I'm sure this sounds frustrating to the average HN dev who runs a legitimate startup with cloudflare on top and is now biting their nails worried to death about what will happen to them. But "online casino" immediately raised a million alarm bells in the post.

Dylan16807 2y ago
And the part where they offered to remove the secondary domains and couldn't get an answer?
nolverostae 2y ago
I did mention the multiple-domains issue in the post. It would not have been amazing for us to remove our secondary domains, but we would have been very happy to do it if it had resolved the issue. We asked them again and again but they would not give us any detail or options apart from their 120k/year package. Note that BYOIP (which I guess they could reasonably have required to isolate us even if we only use a single domain) is available for a fraction of the cost elswhere (e.g. fastly). Since we already left Cloudflare the only reason I finished writing this article is to warn others. I think it's still relevant to many companies regardless of what you think of casinos, since very unprofessional sales tactics (unprofessional as in business threatening) seem common place with them. Do look at the linked other posts and comments here from other people affected that don't have anything to do with casinos. I'm happy to answer questions as well.
- Chyzwar 2y ago
  For me, the worst part is blackmail and account ban. If you had legal presence in EU then new Digital Services Act[1] might a help for you. I am not sure if you could sue them based on that law, but you could maybe lodge a complaint. https://www.wolftheiss.com/insights/digital-service-act-explained-new-obligations-for-online-businesses-and-other-digital-services/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/digital-services-act

lightedman 2y ago

"Now this needs a bit of context on what they are talking about. We do have multiple domains that mostly act as mirrors to our main domain. We have these for a few reasons. One is that since we are a casino, we have different regulatory requirements we need to comply with in many countries. For example, many games are only available in some countries. Some countries we block completely. Then we have a few different domains that remove certain game groups or site features - for example our social features (chat, user tipping / interaction) or our sportsbook. Another is that we use them to target different global user groups and affiliates and track conversions long-term. This also means that if a country DNS-blocks our main domain, a secondary domain may still be available. This could arguably be seen as a violation of the Cloudflare TOS, as they wrote above." Looks like they COMPLY with regulatory interest, to me.

scrollaway 2y ago
When it comes to laws and taxes, "comply" and "evade" tend to be synonyms. "In order to comply with tax regulations and donor laws, we had to structure our activities in order to make it possible for political donations to be classified as regular consulting income".
- sersi 2y ago
  At least from discussions I've had over the years with my accountants, comply and evade are very different. Evasion is when you are doing something that's explicitly illegal. Optimization and compliance is when you comply with the law while trying as much as possible to reduce your tax. In some cases, there's a bit of a grey area where you use multiple structures that according to your accountant should comply with the law but in a way that has never actually been tested legally. That last part tends to be named "optimization" rather than "compliance"
  - TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
    This is in part why good laws are more concerned with what “it” is rather than what “it” is called. Good laws define something and then name it, so that you can test a pattern of facts and determine whether “it” is indeed what the law covers. For me, my corporate tax professional errs on the side of well tested strategies or those that the IRS has ruled on administratively, and that is perfect for my risk tolerance.

ksec 2y ago

>Hopefully Cloudflare provides a perspective. Well HN is the unofficially official Cloudflare Support forum. I think we will hear from them soon. From past experience normally their response time for anything Cloudflare on HN is within 2-3 hours.

chadsix 2y ago

If that's the take, that means Cloudflare is okay with 'breaking laws' so long as they can take a heavy cut of the ill gotten gains? </sarcasm> Let's not try to find reasons to harm the messenger and stick to the facts -- a paying customer was suddenly extorted for hundreds of thousand of dollars out of nowhere.

rvnx 2y ago

Taking a step back, why would they even care if their platform is supposedly neutral and not responsible for the content ? If they can indeed stop providing services to a casino, why cannot they shutdown a website spreading pro-war propaganda, or a website selling illegal services ? It means they are making editorial choices, instead of just being the technological provider and being a neutral "internet pipe". Not sure it's really in their best interest to self-police in the end, as they could lose their DMCA safe harbor provision ?

chadsix 2y ago
> Not sure it's really in their best interest to self-police in the end, as they could lose their DMCA safe harbor provision ? This. That said, we're seeing this across so many platforms, from datacenters to social network sites. They blew their safe harbor provisions years ago and yet remain untouched despite this.
- zbentley 2y ago
  It’s not “editorial” to choose to stop serving (or charge more money to) a customer whose actions pose legal difficulties or risks to your business. If some country’s vice division contacts cloudflare legal due to a customer’s illegal online gambling presence, I guarantee that cop does not care about a US/EU copyright law. The same thing is true for IP reputation, just without an external official complaining. If other CF customers are negatively impacted by one customer’s action, CF isn’t violating safe harbor by booting that customer or passing on the costs of mitigating that impact. That’s just running a business, not exercising editorial review of hosted content in violation of safe harbor provisions.
CuriousCosmic 2y ago
> Taking a step back, why would they even care if their platform is supposedly neutral and not responsible for the content ? Because their main network all uses one big IP address pool and the blocks by various regions/countries against their site were probably not just DNS blocks but also IP address blocks. So they now have an account whose activity is getting their IPs banned in countries where they operate. So they told the account owners they needed to pay for an enterprise account and a dedicated IP address pool maintained by cloudflare. That's why CF kept talking about BYOIP in the emails. i.e. "Pay for us to build you a quarantine with your own IP pool or leave ASAP"

nolverostae 2y ago

I do encourage you to read the whole article cause there is some fine details in there. The main point is that we were happy to remove any domains apart from our main domain (which gets > 95% of our traffic) but Cloudflare did not give us that option or any other detail on the supposed issue.

xnx 2y ago

This has been my experience with 80+% of these loud complaints about services, especially regarding "losing Google traffic". Dig into it just a little and you find out the complainer was doing something extremely shady that the service is often too polite/proper to call out in a public forum.

user_7832 2y ago

If 90 or 95% of their traffic comes from a single domain (and presumably has for a while), that still doesn’t make OP sound guilty. If there was a legal issue Cloudflare legal should’ve stepped in, not their sales team.

Tao3300 2y ago
That was the part that bugged me. This workflow is very busted from a user standpoint, though I'm sure it works very nicely to Cloudflare! It smells like the "problem" was detected by automation, but instead of being able to reach anyone technical to work through it, you can only call sales teams. In my opinion it's one racket vs another.

kosolam 2y ago

Obviously you work for CF. I did read the full post.

foundry27 2y ago

Using localized versions of your services to comply with regional laws and enhance user experiences (i.e. make money) is SOP for practically every international $bigco. Online gambling is regulated and legal in ~50%-70% of the world; without actual evidence to the contrary, it’s completely reasonable to assume that this is a legitimate business. I’m really struggling to agree with the “two sides to every story” replies being left here about how there’s likely shady activity going on behind the scenes, when to me the post read as candid and transparent about the nature of the nature of the business, the admitted legitimacy of CF’s TOS violation claims against them, and the content of the communications with CF. My 2c: It’s scummy that CF did this. It looks like they were disingenuous about the severity of the violations and used it as an excuse to get more $$$ from an already paying customer to make the manufactured problem go away.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mardifoufs 2y ago

This is literal theory crafting lol. CloudFlare never said or implied that in their emails, yet you seem to know more than the CF reps themselves?

ndiddy 2y ago

This shouldn't matter, in general Cloudflare responds to complaints about allowing illegal content with "we're a neutral utility, we forwarded your complaint to the site's webhost". To me, the article showed that Cloudflare was being extremely aggressive with selling the customer on an enterprise plan and repeatedly invented excuses to get them on the phone with their sales team. They then took the site offline and locked them out of their account when the customer started talking with other CDNs.

kaliqt 2y ago

Nah, you have different domains so you can track and maintain flows, also the regulations might even stipulate having domains in the locale, the headline is very much accurate after reading the article.

supriyo-biswas 2y ago

Is the casino illegal in the jurisdiction they're based out of? It doesn't seem so, so there is at least a valid reason for Cloudflare to keep them as a customer as they're not violating the laws where they have their business in.

pclmulqdq 2y ago

With a casino, the issue isn't just domains, it's also IPs. That's why they pushed BYOIP so heavily.

csomar 2y ago

Except Cloudflare position here is not to ban them but they want to get paid for it. You are shaming the OP and his business but the reality is that Cloudflare has acted in a worse manner and that should be highlighted.