Comment by temp-dude-87844

The linked post is PR, or more accurately, damage control; and I say this with no malice towards Cloudflare. Simply, it's in their Terms of Service [1] that they can terminate accounts for any reason, which is exactly what they did.

Unfortunately for them, this puts them squarely in the same category as, say, Google [2][3][4], whose near-ubiquitous presence in people's digital lives intersects with their black-box suspension behavior and near-memetic lack of customer support, to unpleasant effects. And no ill will towards Google either; they are just one of several examples who exist at the sweet spot of significant market share, widespread presence at various layers of information-networking, and a largely disconnected customer support experience.

Cloudflare is trying to set themselves apart from a company (and competitors) that evoke that association by blogging about the gravity of their decision, but at this stage their writings aren't backed by demonstrable due process, like they aspire to work towards. Instead, they truthfully admit that it's troubling that any number of private corporations up and down the stack can boot people and information off the net, and then segue off to a self-reflective, but inconclusive closing.

No new ground is blazed by this post. After all, those hosting content that they know has fallen afoul of contemporary sensibilities are still concerned, the people troubled by private corporations' control of the net stack have another example to add to their list, and the people who are most disturbed by the nature of the content banned in this instance are pleased this situation played out the way it did.

Some will invoke the slippery slope argument, and perhaps rightfully so. I'd argue from a pragmatic standpoint that mainstream views shift over time, so it's natural that some topics will become taboo, some views will become to be seen obsolete and even abhorrent, as history has shown. And absent government regulation (in all relevant jurisdictions), corporations will try to act in their own self-interest, trying to balance reassuring their own customer-base with satisfying wider public value-sets, while seeking to shed customers who may cause them a disproportionate amount of cost: monetary, reputational, or otherwise. Government regulation protects certain classes of people through various mechanisms, like those with disabilities, or certain, but not all intrinsic characteristics that have been commonly used in the past to discriminate. We, as societies, then overlay subjective judicial systems to try to reason whether corporations' behavior towards certain individuals was legal or illegal.

It's wasted effort to try to gauge, as outsiders, whether Cloudflare will enact a transparent process if any process they enact operates solely on the honor system. If it's checked by the legal system, then that's a different story. We're too early for that story.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/, section 5 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12972554 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3839568