Comment by devwastaken
4 years ago
Cloudflare would do better to simply stop making posts every time they do something. Every other company bans users every day and have learned to stop talking about it. Or the inverse. Regardless of what cloudflare does, right or wrong, there will be mobs of people responding negatively and positively to it. People love drama.
If their policy was "we'll ban anyone we want for whatever reason." I'd respect that more because that's the truth.
Further troubling is how this is over what they believe to be illigal conduct. It may very well be, but now they're creating a precedent that they are capable of detecting and stopping it themselves outside the justice system.
This also doesn't stop kiwifarms or it's organizers. If there's illigal conduct, or even civil discovery, CF has to give up those details. All stopping Ddos support does is allows kiwifarms to receive Ddos.
No doubt they'll eventually take to tor and that doesn't have a good physical address to serve warrants to.
Their transparency actually makes me sympathetic to the weight of the decisions they're making. Their acknowledgement that it could make things worse is also very honest and refreshing. I hope they continue making these posts especially since they control such a massive percentage of internet infrastructure.
So transparency is bad?
With the amount of illigal content on the net, CF is not making blog posts every time they stop service. They're doing it in this case because kiwifarms is popular. And now it's causing dozens of posts stirring drama and steering users towards it.
The justifications are also weak, and put CF in a bad light because they believe themselves to be justice. A simple "we don't like what they're doing so we won't service it" is an honest answer.
I adore Cloudflare for making this post. It shows they have a true commitment to taking freedom of expression about as far as they can.