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Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#91

Post by c3534l »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #26

I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies. If I want to run my own website, I need an IP address at the minimum, and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting. In a public setting, if people don't like what I'm saying, they can't force me to be quiet (generally)…

› if Google doesn't like a website, it can derank it

If Google actually does that, they're asking for an anti-trust suit.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#92

Post by interstitial »

augustt wrote: post #18
kuschku wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, everyone trying to work against this gets immediately downvoted on HN, because everyone considers the work of these companies just so convenient. It’s classical short-term vs. long-term thinking, and it’s damaging not just to privacy, but also to the startup economy as a whole.

To me it seems like decentralization is actually very popular on HN.

As long as it's written in Go, Rust or formerly Haskell

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#93

Post by MrZongle2 »

It's easy to defend the speech of those which you agree or, at the very least, don't vehemently disagree with.

With increased calls for Internet access to be a human right and for Internet providers to be treated as common carriers, the arbitrary punishment of lawful-yet-distasteful speech should be considered almost as repellent as the Daily Stormer.

Yet here we are. And down the slope we continue to go.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#95

Post by jlgaddis »

bnjms wrote: post #87
kazagistar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much for believing in "due process".

Much like free speech due process concerns citizens and their government rather than people and any public organization.

Even when one explicitly calls it out as something they believe in?

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#96

Post by kazagistar »

slg wrote: post #63

For all the people who are warning of a slippery slope or a chilling effect, where do we draw a line? This site along with others like it likely helped spur a person on to murder a few days ago. This site along with other like it celebrated that murder. This site along with other like are organizing protests at that murder victim's funeral. How in good conscience can you be an accomplice in spreading that message?

I mean, the networking infrastructure carried that message. The people who manufactured the murder weapon assisted the murder goals.

The point is that we have a legal process to deal with murder. If we wanted to suppress the message glorifying it and encouraging it, we should do that directly, and take down the site through legal due process. Going after infrastructure is the wrong solution when you should be confronting problems directly. And if you don't want to confront it directly (ie, maybe the site is protected by free speech laws that we don't want to revoke)... whats the point of those free speech protecting laws if they just end up being subverted through a different avenue, and one that does not have to follow the process and regulation of the law at that?

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#97

Post by KirinDave »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #45
RandVal30142 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also said this: >“I realized there was no way we were going to have that conversation with people calling us Nazis,” Prince said. “The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”

Don't try to market yourself as critical Internet infrastructure if you're going to throw your principals away because someone made you feel icky. The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are okay, but this was the line? The worlds gone sideways. Edit: I was proud of Cloudflare not turning them off after their domain was deregistered. Now, so disappointed. Freedom of speech is rarely the speech we agree with. Or even speech we…

> Don't try to market yourself as critical Internet infrastructure if you're going to throw your principals away because someone made you feel icky.

When the internet is no longer privatized and is guaranteed as a public service by law, then this argument will have a leg to stand on.

We've taken it for granted for a long time that the folks at the top of the data food chain are benevolent despots. This is a belief that is ultimately not rational.

Maintaining an internet made of actors who are ultimately private corporations providing a service enables these decisions.

The thing is, I suspect if we made the internet a public service in each country, then its speech laws would actually be substantially more restrictive than what CF, Google and others are doing.

Case in point:

> The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are okay, but this was the line? The worlds gone sideways.

Yeah. Although sideways? Let's not forget that an horrific act of fatal violence branded as domestic terrorism that was specifically targeted at suppressing free speech to further a regime of racially motivated violence and hate. Daily Stormer put up 2 distinct articles arguing this was okay. They then defamed a private organization by claiming they too supported that vile sentiment.

I mean, don't get me wrong. DDoS gangs are extortionists. But at the end of the day money is just money. Human rights are fundamental.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#98

Post by r3bl »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #26

I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies. If I want to run my own website, I need an IP address at the minimum, and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting. In a public setting, if people don't like what I'm saying, they can't force me to be quiet (generally)…

> Replace Google with an ISP, and all of a sudden, it seems everyone says the ISP shouldn't be able to do that.

Well, for starters, in a hypothetical scenario in which Google does this, Google is not making profit off of it, as ISPs probably would in every hypothetical not-netneutrality scenario which we thought of.

> If the web is supposed to be the future of communication, but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them, how is that argument valid? Can someone explain that to me?

You can't shut them down. They can always host their website from the .onion domain, without Cloudflare, and handle all the traffic they want. You can shut down their domains (see: Pirate Bay), you can shut down their CDN provider (see: this example), you can shut down anything you want, but you still won't be able to shut them down completely. Even if you do, their history is on both archive.is and Wayback.

What you can do is distance yourself and do everything to make it complicated to spread their ideas. And that's what these companies are doing. By making conscious decisions, they're refusing to provide a service to a certain website. That is completely legal to do, with very few exceptions (listed here: http://www.phrc.pa.gov/File-A-Complaint/Types-of-Complaints/...).

> Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily.

I completely agree with you in this section.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#99

Post by christilut »

I don't like this...

If I have a controversial opinion (hypothetical, unrelated to the current subject matter) and it gets removed from CDN's and if I then put that opinion in my self hosted blog and someone powerful decides to DDoS my little server (and consequent hosting attempts)... Am I then not effectively censored on the internet?

It's interesting in how many places (internet and real world) this is happening lately... Interesting but mostly just scary.

I'm sure Cloudflare meant well but this action should have been thought through more.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#100

Post by [deleted] »

MollyR wrote: post #84
breadbox wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you honestly think that the rest of the world is only now hearing about the Daily Stormer, then you must have a very plush rock that you've been living under. I assure you that many, many others have not had that particular luxury.

I don't think that's fair. Some of us work very hard for a living or have kids. I just learned about the Daily Stormer, this weekend. EDIT: on second thought, I wonder if this is what Daily Stormer wanted all along. They have raised their profile enormously now.

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