> Fact-less conspiranoia.
I love how people reflectively answer with cries of "no evidence!" to something that presents the evidence about exactly the thing they are claiming has no evidence. I get a distinct impression that the only person they're trying to convince is themselves, by self-hypnotically denying the reality in public.
There's a fact of CF booting sites, there's a fact of CF having IP blacklist, there's a fact of getting into IP blacklist being a very frustrating experience, there's a fact of various activists itching to make the lives of their political enemies a very unpleasant experience and launching successful pressure campaigns to do exactly that.
Did that happen with CF and IP blocking? No, I explicitly said it didn't, at least - I don't know any cases of it. But there's a lot of facts confirming there's a capability and motivation to do so. You may not believe it would happen, and you have a right to believe so, but when you are denying known facts, I don't think your beliefs are based on anything but wishful thinking. Your argument would be strong if you showed that, despite the known facts, it still couldn't happen. But instead to claim it couldn't happen you have to deny the facts.
> How many times have they done it?
Probably more than I know, but it's too big to bother with me, so I'm not too concerned about it right now. Maybe if I was in the same business as Assange, I'd be worried more.
> very much underweighing the costs of doing something like that.
Like what costs? You mean to say, no major provider would dare to boot the person from the Internet? Like Facebook, Twitter, Paypal, Venmo, Gofundme, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Mailchimp, Tiktok, etc. would not dare to block people for political dissent and expressing unpopular opinions? Because, you know, opportunity costs, collateral damage, unintended consequences, reputation costs, brand harm. That' just couldn't happen. All that is fact-less conspiranoia.
> Why not make the same complaint about your ISP, your hardware manufacturer, your OS manufacturer
I can buy different hardware. I can install different OS. With some effort, but I can connect to a different ISP. Any of that won't help if Cloundflare would refuse to talk to me.
> Remember that US criminal system attributes 3 elements to a crime
Oh, but that's not a crime. That's the beauty of it - remember, it's a private action of a free enterprise, and you have no rights there. And even if the government would hold weekly meetings with Cloudflare suggesting them who exactly needs to be banned, it's still free enterprise, right? I mean, excluding the fact that the government would never do something like that, because reputation costs, brand harm, etc. That's another instance of fact-less conspiranoia, of course.
> I’m not defending CloudFlare here so much as tired of conspiracy theories and paranoia and social panics.
That's nothing. Imagine how tired you'd be when it turns out everything you thought is "paranoia" is actually happening. Of course, it would never happen to you - you'd never disagree with the government, or any people in power, or voice any unpopular opinions in public, would you now?