Comment by phillipcarter
4 years ago
> They clearly position themselves as "infrastructure". HNers should appreciate this more, as it's often a recurring theme here to talk about ISPs as infrastructure.
That's trying to have cake and eat it too. I am highly sympathetic to operating like infrastructure, and I would love to see regulatory bodies take this up as an issue to try and figure out. What I am not sympathetic to is having a documented history of not acting like a utility, but then puffing up chests and saying that they are a utility only when it happens to serve them.
> having a documented history of not acting like a utility
Elaborate, please?
From the blog post linked by the GGGP:
"In 2017, we terminated the neo-Nazi troll site The Daily Stormer. And in 2019, we terminated the conspiracy theory forum 8chan."
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...
The claim is that a "utility" does not cut off service for users who they disagree with. In the blog post, Cloudfare appears to claim that they will follow this standard in the future:
"Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again."
Regardless of whether they made the right decision here, this definitely feels like an abrupt 180 turn.
My reading of that blog post and this one is that they now think that cutting off service to the Daily Stormer and 8chan was the wrong call.
"While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action."
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Exactly. The distinction needs to be a very, very bright and clear line legally. If it's fuzzy, then the fuzziness will be pushed and pushed using plausible deniability.