Comment by jyrkesh

> SHOULD

How could things work any differently? A problem cannot be addressed until it rises to their attention. I don’t think there can be any dispute in that.

There are diffent ways this can happen, but that just shifts the argument to how they should structure their organization to facilitate those different ways. Do they prefer an open reporting system? Do they actively monitor and look for problems? Do they decide to be so hands off that only problems that rise to their attention organically, outside of formal structure, are the ones they deal with?

Once we recognize that, the discussion shifts to what sort of problems, when brought to their attention, they decide to address or decide to take no action.

Now we can have a conversation about that, so let’s do a thought experiment:

You own a small business, let’s say bespoke software. It’s small enough that the nature of the work means you talk to every potential customer before beginning a project. A customer comes to you with a very interesting and intellectually challenging project. You like this kind of work, it’s your favorite type of project. But then in the conversation the customer says “I’m going to use this software in part to facilitate personal harassment that is borderline illegal. It will make targets miserable and they will have little ability to do anything about it.”

Do you still take that job? If you answer “no” then your value system is inconsistent unless it entails the belief that Cloudflare should act as it did.

After that, all we’re arguing about are cloudflare’s motives: Money, PR, etc. You might argue that cloudflare does a bad job at this. Or lacks the ability to scale that decision in all cases. But your value system still says that if their is someone at cloudflare aware of the problem that has the power to say “NO” as you would then they should do so.

You can criticize cynical motives or incompetent and spotty enforcement but you can’t criticize them for those cases when they actually say “no”.

If you would say “yes” then we can amicably part ways in this discussion. We would have discussed things in a way where we have positively engaged in a discourse about our beliefs to the point that I will know enough about yours to know that we disagree on such a fundamental level that the productive discussion we had to get to this point has run it’s course. We are unlikely to get further, probably just repeating and restating things in different ways.

But if you have a no then you really have to examine why you feel cloudflare should not do the same. How you can, absent those secondary issues of motive and scale, make a logically consistent argument that individual people at cloudflare with the same power of “no” should behave any differently.