Comment by ringaroundthetx
9 years ago
Couldn't he face personal liability in a civil lawsuit for monetary damages? Like if Daily Stormtrooper's hosting costs go up in a DDOS
9 years ago
Couldn't he face personal liability in a civil lawsuit for monetary damages? Like if Daily Stormtrooper's hosting costs go up in a DDOS
Obviously, absolutely not.
The site could, in theory, sue Cloudflare for failing to provide the services they paid for.
That is, they could do so if they paid anything for the services they received (they didn't).
And it's only if Cloudflare didn't have a "we reserve the right to discontinue services at any time for any reason at our sole discretion" clause in their ToS (they do).
Of course they can sue. Anybody can sue anybody else for whatever fancy they have. But that's not the same as winning that suit.
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Can you give me several reasons why a judge wouldn't merely grant summary judgement in favor of Daily Stormer? Or why their arguments would fail?
"Cloudflare unexpectedly revoked our traffic mitigating service in the middle of our highest costly traffic, our costs went up this much. Cloudflare caused this, these are the damages, and here are the punitive damages to deter this behavior in the future, the CEO even said this is not company policy."
Because of this sentence from Cloudflare's Terms of Service:
"You further agree that if...Cloudflare, in its sole discretion, deems it necessary due to excessive burden or potential adverse impact on Cloudflare’s systems, potential adverse impact on other users, server processing power, server memory, abuse controls, or other reasons, Cloudflare may suspend or terminate your account without notice to or liability to you" [1].
If you don't want that kind of a service relationship, you negotiate a fixed-term contract up front.
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ Section 10; also see § 15 (Termination)
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Because it is pretty rare for a judge to side with a consumer who states they would like the judge to force the company to do business with them.
Neo Nazis are not a protected class in the sense of the word so they'd have to pull some kind of legal rabbit out of their head to make that work.
The fact that there are damages does not immediately imply that some outside party is liable for those damages. It merely means that you are back where you would have been without that outside party.
So even if Cloudflare caused this that does not immediately imply liability. So if the Daily Stormer wishes to sue Cloudflare they obviously can but I really doubt they will make it stick.
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