Comment by dnissley
4 years ago
Generally in agreement with you here, but are you aware the specifics around why CF dropped services for Stormfront?
CF were holding the line until Stormfront's people claimed that CF were secretly supporters of Stormfront's ideology... which seems like a totally valid reason to drop their services.
Just as if you hired security guards and started being an abusive jerk to them every day, it seems like a reasonable decision for the security agency to drop their services.
I guess what makes it difficult in this case is that the amount of power CF has is so great that any use of that power is immediately troubling.
It's a bit like if pretty much all security guards were under the control of a single company and that company denied services to a person under threat, and in this analogy there's no government to fill the gap.
But there are alternatives, cloudflare isn’t the government, they don’t even have a monopoly.
How is this different from people complaining about facebook not hosting their content - take your stuff to some other private entity that wants to do business with you, these are not institutions which have any obligation or mission beyond making money - even if they like to make PR noises that may be misconstrued otherwise.
“Sir, this is a Wendy’s”