← Back to context

Comment by loteck

4 years ago

Turns out there's no such thing as neutrality. Connecting content to the world is a choice your team approves or declines. You can complain about scalability of that decision all you want. Cloudflare is not neutral, and will never be. You're an active participant and you have to deal with your responsibility.

11 comments

loteck

Reply
pclmulqdq  4 years ago

Is the phone company responsible for connecting content? How about your internet service provider? At what level does someone become responsible?

This is a question for the law, not for the mob. The internet, thanks to a completely fucked up legal regime (section 230), is currently very gray.

Facebook and Twitter, which are commonly used to facilitate large-scale violent riots and play host to far more doxxing and cyberbullying than kiwifarms could ever hope to, get a pass despite being the main facilitator of that communication. In contrast, infrastructure services like Cloudflare (and even AWS) have been subject to intense pressure to drop other sites where people say bad things.

Under this theory, we need to be taking Facebook and Twitter offline immediately. And maybe also the phone company too.

  • loteck  4 years ago

    At all levels, and Cloudflare isn't exempted from that. Social media platforms already routinely decline to host content via moderation.

    • pclmulqdq  4 years ago

      So is it your position that the phone company should disconnect anyone that they believe is saying mean things about people?

      Mainstream social media also largely does not moderate nearly well enough to uphold the standard that you are applying to Cloudflare.

  • anigbrowl  4 years ago

    Well, the phone company can't legally listen in on your private conversations.

    In contrast, nothing prevents Cloudflare from looking at a company's public-facing website (ie as an unprivileged visitor just going to the domain) and deciding whether or not one wants to do business with that company.

    • pclmulqdq  4 years ago

      There is no law preventing your ISP from surveilling you. Are they responsible if you harass someone online and they allow you to keep your service?

      1 reply →