Pretty crazy turnaround. I really liked the pretty clear and reasoned abuse policy[1] they put out recently, and I don't envy the position they are in. On one hand, yes, this specific site is terrible. But they are trying very hard to not become the arbiters of what is terrible and what isn't terrible, and I respect them for that.
It's not an easy line to take, and other companies like Google and Facebook have not made that same choice to stay neutral.
> Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character
I genuinely believe that it's entirely possible to be seen as very neutral and also just ban nazi sites, troll farms, etc. because you choose not to do business with them.
"Neutral", maybe, but their stance goes beyond neutral. 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.
Infrastructure doesn't privately discriminate, period. Water/Electricity utilities don't cut the supply to rapists and terrorists just because they're rapists and terrorists. They cut it when law enforcement ask them to.
This conflicting discussion is better had on this level: "Should Cloudflare be considered infrastructure, or not?". It's not straightforward.
> 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.
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."
I mostly agree that is the claim that they are making. I already quoted the relevant part of the earlier blog, so here's the part from today's:
"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."
I say "mostly" because there is also the interpretation that they believe there were multiple appropriate actions in the earlier cases. I still feel it's a 180 turn from the earlier blog post, though. They set out a clear principle just last week, and already have found an exception that they neglected to mention.
Edit: This doesn't necessarily mean that their revised approach is wrong, just that it's a turnaround.
If they think those earlier decisions were the wrong call, then why haven't they rescinded them? There's no law that says that after you kick someone off your service, you can never invite them back on.
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.
If rapists and terrorists used their water or electrical service as a primary means to rape and terrorize, then those infrastructure services would find themselves feeling justified pressure to develop terms of service prohibiting that conduct, and to cut off the rapists and terrorists who violated those terms.
"Infrastructure" has the luxury of being value-neutral. Cloudflare wishes that were also true of it, frequently and publicly, to no avail.
> those infrastructure services would find themselves feeling justified pressure to develop terms of service prohibiting that conduct
I don't think you understand how infrastructure works or is regulated…
And yes, sometimes this is the case. Even now: Electricity providers are as guilty of keeping those forums online as Cloudflare is. Whatever your "primary means" is, electricity is just as needed as Cloudflare's services are (more, in fact). So… no, you're wrong, there's been zero pressure on the infra, because that pressure is not possible.
Your electrical service can and will be shut off if you use it in a way that the utility provider objects to. If you've never read the rules for your power company it might be enlightening, the ones for PG&E I just pulled up are dozens of pages and list lots of obligations the customer has.
ISPs will also shut you off if they feel like it, for example if you run a server or they otherwise object to what you're doing. CloudFlare already did this too - they have a history of cutting off sex workers who use their services.
> they have a history of cutting off sex workers who use their services
You are making irrelevant aspersions - they cut of sex workers because they are adhering to the US FOSTA laws: "We also terminate security services for content which is illegal in the United States — where Cloudflare is headquartered. This includes Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) as well as content subject to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)."
Cloudflare knowingly fronts many sites that violate FOSTA. They only cared when Switter made the press.
Cloudflare gave us no warning when they suspended our account.
What makes even less sense is that Cloudflare's Head of Sales emailed us offering their services when we mentioned we were getting DDOSed as an escort directory.
Perhaps “making the press” is one limit that legal council use to decide whether CloudFlare is knowingly (according to internal legal theory) breaking the FOSTA laws: i.e. that the legal liability exceeds their appetite for risk. Their exact internal rules for deciding to terminate a sex-worker site are unlikely to be published by CloudFlare, and it could depend on non-public correspondence sent to CloudFlare. “Knowingly” is very legally vague as per this article: https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-politics-of-section-2...
Cloudflare provides DDoS protection. Suppose there were arsonists repeatedly trying to burn down the house of some neo-nazi author. Then suppose a group of people with supposedly no association with the arsonists pressuring the local fire department to stop putting out arson fires for the evil neo-nazi. Does that not raise all sorts of alarm bells for you? Or are people on HN (and the general public) really that far gone?
I don't care for artificial binary categories. Thinking by analogy or by category always confuses the situation. Evaluate each unique situation on its on own idiosyncrasies from first principles and by studying the unique details.
I think what you’re saying is true for water and electricity, but if you were to talk about phone lines I’m not sure that argument holds anymore. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of phone numbers being disconnected for abusive behaviour.
Question: How many nazi sites, troll farms, etc, is Cloudflare still providing services to? I bet you the answer is not zero.
We can debate the merits of a consistently applied policy of "we won't provide our services to nazis/racists/trolls/etc" – but it doesn't appear that is Cloudflare's actual policy.
It appears their actual policy is "we will happily provide services to anybody, nazis/racists/trolls/etc included – until the social media heat gets too hot for us to handle, at which point we will drop the individual site which is the target of that controversy, but continue offering our services to all the other sites like it"
As much as I don't like nazi's and troll farms, I believe they have the right to internet service until they start using it to threaten others with violence.
This said, this will always lead to the nazi's getting banned. At the end of the day they are incapable of not calling for violence. It is their modus operandi.
It is so disappointing seeing you be downvoted for sentiments like this. The neurodivergent and unempathetic nature of this forum really rears its head from time to time.
You've picked a very specific time period here (1933-1945). I presume this is because that is the period where the Nazis were in control of Germany.
This might be an apt comparison if the groups in question controlled a government, but I fear you're forgetting how the Nazis got there. The NSDAP spent a good chunk of the 20s holding large rallies in places they weren't welcome and inciting the local populace until fights broke out (there's a particularly famous brawl that happened in the Wedding district of Berlin). Then they used the resulting media coverage to justify building up a large para-military force (the SA and later the SS) in a weird form of political judo.
I worry that actions like the one cloudflare has taken add to the appeal for a certain type of people for fighting giant organizations as the underdog. There are certain organizations and/or events where fighting against them gives them the publicity they need to attract recruits and succeed.
You should also be careful because we seem to be going into a recession and the right generally benefits from such times (and immediately after). Giving them extra publicity might be a very bad idea.
Communist ideology has nothing to do with murder. It is 100% an economic ideology, and primarily about equality.
Some countries that called themselves communist, and attempted to implement parts of communism, also committed mass murders. But that doesn't reflect on communism as an ideology any more than the actions of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea reflect on democracy.
What a country calls themselves and what they actually are don't always bear any resemblance to each other, and decades of US propaganda notwithstanding, "communism" and "socialism" have absolutely nothing to do with mass murder or authoritarianism.
On the other hand, Nazi ideology is very much about murder, and about forcing anyone who isn't The Master Race into second-class citizen status (or worse).
"But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."
Thanks for this incredibly insightful and completely on-topic quote. From this i can clearly see that the very dream of a more equitable and less late-stage-capitalist future is inevitably doomed, and all forms of communism must be rejected. While the landed gentry obviously have our best interests at heart, and it surely is best to try and pry our futures from their grips by words alone! No drastic action, no revolutions.
As Engels said, any form of revolution is a oxymoron and thus always fails!
All I read from the quote is "all revolutions are authoritarian and people saying otherwise are either useful idiots or active supporters of our enemies." Nothing about them always failing. Nothing about communism being bad or capitalism being good. Just a candid statement, unsavory to some, including yourself it would seem.
It’s unsavory to me insofar that it completely ignores the comment being replied to which doesn’t mention revolutions at all, doesn’t refute or even acknowledge any of the points, and the lack of anything other than the quote comes across as very smarmy with a touch of “destroying X with facts and logic”/“lol gottem!”.
> Communist ideology has nothing to do with murder. It is 100% an economic ideology, and primarily about equality.
"Revolutionary violence" is a key principle of Marxist-Leninist ideology:
> At the outset of his revolutionary career, Lenin embraced a doctrine of organized violence that would attack capitalism from above and below, the revolutionary leaders to create new structures of governance while inciting and focusing the concentrated fury of the masses on the destruction of the old. Prior to the revolution he vigorously defended this doctrine both against those who would implement violence prematurely, without developing its mass or organized character, and those who would reject violence altogether. Once in power he initiated the fission of Russian society, using state structures specifically designed to implement violence - the political police, the army, the armed grain collection detachments - to lead the masses against large segments of the population whom he labeled 'enemies of the regime'. From November 1917 to March 1921 he pursued a policy (retroactively named 'War Communism') of mass, relatively indiscriminate violence against the bourgeoisie, capitalists large and small, much of the peasantry and, indeed, anyone who violated any of his many decrees.
Witte, J. (1993). Violence in Lenin’s thought and practice: The spark and the conflagration. Terrorism and Political Violence, 5(3), 135–203. doi:10.1080/09546559308427223
And the Nazis...? In both cases, the problem is latent inside our societies. The dam bursts and revolutionary fervor appear until checked away. Not until a large amount of innocent victims.
PRC is state capitalist as well, rhetoric notwithstanding. They even needed to purge their Marxists a few years back.
Wait what, there aren't any nazi states as far as I'm aware but the PRC and North Korea are both real and have nukes? There are still communist political parties in every western democracy.
A nice hack for advancing a hypocritical political position on HN: just say
>I genuinely believe [contradictory proposition].
That way, anyone who was to question the value of said belief or the wisdom of sharing it with others could be construed as having engaged in some form of "personal attack".
Its so weird how everyone we don't like is a nazi.
Your opinion appears to be popular though. Through enough pressure we have successfully removed ddos protection from a site that people on here hope gets ddos'ed.
One day, this conversation and this thread will be remembered. How there was a period where everyone celebrated corporations silencing individuals or allowing mobs to ddos them. What happened to our internet.
There can be limits on speech and free speech. There are many places where we've agreed there should be limits on speech, for instance it's illegal to lie under oath, or to threaten someone with physical harm, or to falsely advertise.
Stupid thing to say, your countries Supreme Court constantly have thousands of lawyers arguing over the distinctions, definitions and interpretation of the 1A.
Plus, Cloudfare isnt the government and is quite explicitly NOT burdened by a legal requirement to protect any users free speech. The fuck are you on about?
Fraud isn't fraud unless someone's resources are stolen, conspiracy isnt conspiracy unless some unlawful act is imminent or has occurred. In both cases, its not the words that are illegal, it is tangible, observable real world actions that are.
The difference between fraud and a bad investment or a foolish purchase consists entirely in the worlds spoken/text written.
“The price is algorithmically guaranteed to go up.” vs “there is always risk involved in investing.” Even “pen flown on the space shuttle” vs. “pen designed by NASA.” Everything else can be identical but they are legally different.
You can commit conspiracy without actually doing the crime. And one criminal acting on his own vs a conspiracy can be a matter of planning and moral comfort, not just material assistance (I think, IANAL).
“the scope of banned speech: that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action”.
Like harassing someone? Or like publishing someones personal information to attempt to have them harassed or hurt? Sounds like speech is a “real world action” that has observable effects… and oh, it looks like the courts may even have considered this…
"Directed" has a meaning. "Go do this thing" is directed.
Honestly I'm very skeptical of any accusation of harassment online, seeing as you can just block people. Maybe I've never experienced it and don't know. When I ehar the word harassment I think of showing up to someone's workplace, home, things where you can't avoid them. Sending them messages that can be blocked, I'm not so sure. But that's a tangent to the topic of our discussion.
Publishing someone's address and telling people to go to their home and harass or harm them is direct incitement. This is absolutely punishable, because it's more than speech, it's conspiring to commit real world action, as you said. I'm curious, if that's the sort of thing they do, has anyone been criminally charged or convicted for such behavior? I mean that genuinely, I'm trying to learn about all this kiwifarms stuff as much as I can.
So that's not cool, I don't see anyone saying "go to their home" in those screenshots but I get the implication. So my question is, when will there be criminal charges? If this is directed incitement it's criminal, has anyone been charged or convicted for it from kiwi farms?
Even if KF was cooperating with law enforcement(I think they were, or said they would comply): how long should some company choose to help KF continue though? Is it when criminal charges get filed? After someone is hurt? After someone is arrested? How many people being hurt or arrested is enough?
But this is just business - that is all this is, not a right, not a government, not a monopoly, not even an essential service. CF wants to cast themselves as some principled and righteous defender, but they are just a business that was finding it profitable to provide services to another business, and now they don’t.
I read comments like this and it reminds me just how much critical thinking has been stripped away from people via their social media over consumption.
Did you forget when a duly-elected president of a Democratic nation was deplatformed under your same “easy no brainer” principles?
Yeah, yeah, that’s different, that guy sucked (is a Nazi even?).
What happens though when you don’t think he sucks or it’s a to a marginalized group?
You can’t understand why these ideas are controversial?
They are, the actual cloudflare free tier (not the one they give to various "social good" sites, that's way better) is not actually that great when it comes to a "well executed" DDOS attack. I don't know the exact details, and I guess it's possible it changed in the last couple years, but it's what I've heard.
Interesting. Their messaging on that isn't great in that case. I've used them for years and was under the impression that their full DDoS suite (aside from case managers and such) was part of free tier.
I guess the one signal I had is that WAF is a paid product.
Most major sites started out as being pro-free speech, and ultimately bowed to public pressure in removing various forms of content. There is little reason to assume that cloudflare won't ultimately do the same. It's admirable that they are trying to avoid becoming censors, but I predict it will ultimately be futile.
You're too charitable. They are already censors and have been for a long time, but talk disingenuously and hypocritically about it every time they pull this shit off in public.
> I really liked the pretty clear and reasoned abuse policy[1]
Except it's neither. The way they try to brand their caching reverse proxy as only a "security service" instead of a "hosting service" is absurd and not based on any well reasoned logic.
So what if they aren’t hosting the backend? How do you even define “the backend”? Is it the PHP frontend code serving the site? Or the database server?
Cloudflare definitely was hosting the content through their CDN. That’s hosting, there’s really no reasonable debate to be had about this.
The point is the site can come back online through an alternate CDN vendor, assuming they can find one that wants their business. The origin server(s) presumably are still online. The origin servers "host the site."
"Origin server" is a well understood concept in CDNs.
My opinion is that if you're hosting controversial content, it's on you to provision redundancy. No company has the obligation to serve you if you piss them off, violate their TOS, whatever. So, yeah, you better be prepared with a back up host to switch to in a hurry.
> But they are trying very hard to not become the arbiters of what is terrible and what isn't terrible
I don't think so. "Trying very hard" would entail doing the actually hard thing which is to continue to provide service to the controversial website. That's the only action that would allow them to stay true to the principles they claim to believe in.
Censoring kiwifarms is the easy way out. It reveals exactly what Cloudflare has become: arbiters of which sites are allowed to stay up on the internet.
Correct. There is a status quo bias that infects people's thinking, as if deciding not to deplatform somebody isn't itself a decision. Similar fallacy that people bring to the Trolley Problem which can maximize the number of dead people.
It's not an easy line to take, and other companies like Google and Facebook have not made that same choice to stay neutral.
> Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character
1. https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...