Comment by tedivm
9 years ago
There will always be companies that care more about making a buck than anything else. For years spammers and malware authors have been able to find hosting without issue, and taking them down has been a serious pain in the ass. All these nazis need to do is rent a server in russia (where they've moved their name server) and they will be fine.
The idea that companies like Cloudflare should help support sites like this is nonsensical. The slippery slope argument is an awful fallacy and ignores the fact that we can't even get content most of the world agrees is bad (child porn, active malware exploits, spammers) offline.
>The idea that companies like Cloudflare should help support sites like this is nonsensical.
It is your framing of the idea that's nonsensical. Infrastructure companies should not need to police all their services. Heck, they shouldn't police their services. That is what real police and courts are for.
As an analogy, should AT&T monitor calls and terminate service for customers using racist slurs? Now, a lot of people would surely argue that such example is false equivalency, but it follows from the same line of reasoning and would have similar long-term consequences.
A modern, stable society needs stable infrastructure that does not bend and shift based on current events or social media campaigns. Even if in some cases it seems "fair". Because anyone with a bit of sense knows it will not be "fair" in all cases. Heck, in the current environment of extreme political polarization that much should be bloody obvious.
AT&T had common carrier status which indemnifies them against what subscribers did but that came at the cost of a lot of government oversight on what they could do in return.
Lots of private companies wouldn't want that (and AT&T butted heads over it).
Personally I think Facebook is already over that line, when you have the eyeballs of about 1/7th of the planet you are already a potential threat that should have government level oversight, in a democracy, you control the eyeballs you control the politicians.
And Cloudflare say they handle 10% of internet traffic. They are a behemoth just like Facebook.
> Infrastructure companies should not need to police all their services. Heck, they shouldn't police their services. That is what real police and courts are for.
I'm agreed that they shouldn't need to, but not that they shouldn't at all. Making these sorts of companies on the hook for things their customers do would make it impossible to run a company like this at all.
But remember, companies are made up of people. Those people have values and, with those values, make moral judgments -- and it is entirely within their right to do so. In the majority of cases I would hope that most people would choose to be content-neutral, but I absolutely expect and support that some people will eventually hit a threshold where they cannot look the other way anymore. And, in general, I think that's _absolutely ok_.
That's an awful analogy. No one is telling cloudflare to monitor things- what's happening is that people are reporting the issue to cloudflare directly. A better analogy would be AT&T shutting down an account that was using to threaten or harass people.
> As an analogy, should AT&T monitor calls and terminate service for customers using racist slurs? Now, a lot of people would surely argue that such example is false equivalency, but it follows from the same line of reasoning and would have similar long-term consequences.
Angry mobs aren't thinking about "long-term consequences." Unfortunately, the media loves angry mobs because it generates viewership and clicks.
> The slippery slope argument is an awful fallacy and ignores the fact that we can't even get content most of the world agrees is bad (child porn, active malware exploits, spammers) offline
So is false equivalence. Child porn, active malware exploits and spam that fails to comply with the CAN-SPAM act are all illegal. Hating people is not illegal, nor is it illegal to have a website that hates people.
I'm not suggesting that CloudFlare was or is under any obligation to assist Daily Stormer in getting views, but deplorable or not, there's nothing I know to have been illegal about it, unlike the other bad acts you are lumping it in with.
It's not a false equivalence because I wasn't trying to compare the two. My entire point was that the illegal content, and stuff that we all know is bad, is still online- anyone can access it with a small amount of effort (or not), and even though big companies are already blocking it and refuse to host it the content is still readily available.
If we can't even get that content offline, the idea that cloudflare refusing to host this website means this website won't be able to find hosting is absolutely absurd.