Comment by CircleSpokes
4 years ago
What are you talking about? Cloudflare didn't host the website. They provided ddos protection via reverse proxy. That is different from hosting.
4 years ago
What are you talking about? Cloudflare didn't host the website. They provided ddos protection via reverse proxy. That is different from hosting.
My understanding was they were able to configure a simple page that was hosted by Cloudflare that was shown whenever the origin servers were not accessible. They put a joke about trans suicides on it.
Once that joke was pointed out on Twitter, it quickly disappeared. Probably because it was incredibly obviously against Cloudflare‘s policies and Cloudflare was the one hosting it.
A CDN caches (= stores) the bits they provide. In other words, they are hosting contents on others behalf. I can't speak to a legal distinction, but if you torrent child pornography, I'm pretty sure you aren't going far with a claim that you were "just a CDN".
I suggest you look into safe harbor laws when it comes to ISPs. They have very broad protection from the consequences of their users' actions.
Every byte that the end user sees came from Cloudflare's servers. Try making the case that that's not hosting in a court of law.
That is a very easy case to make in the US. ISPs have incredibility broad safe harbor laws (even more so when just providing transit instead of actually hosting like this case). They have very broad protection from the consequences of their users' actions.
They are not just providing transit. They are the front-end webserver receiving the request and sending the response. Transit is someone like AT&T or Sprint.
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