Seems we haven’t figured out how to draw the correct distinctions between what are clearly different types of businesses.
If Patreon is a gallery or art market or auction house, and Reddit is a Café, what is Cloudflare? Are they a toll road? Private highway? Something else?
Likening any of those businesses to the closest brick and mortar equivalent is probably futile, but bear with me a moment.
In the real world, businesses generally do business on their own terms. If they don’t own their own property, they lease it, and the municipality they are in zones the land and enforces certain regulations. There might be a couple of other factors, the United States has determined race to not be a valid criteria for whether you allow them into your public facing establishment. Mostly we don’t allow sex segregation, but there are exceptions here too, like with public baths.
A Café owner has an enormous amount of leeway with who they will do business with though. By and large they can ask people to leave, or to not come back so long as the determining factor isn’t discrimination against a protected class. They can compare properties, including landlords, neighborhoods and zoning regulations. If they want to target a particular demographic, it can be as simple as making the menu bilingual or playing a particular kind of music.
Now if someone builds a private road on their own property, that is their own business, but if they build a private road under contract to the city and charge people to use it, that is the city’s business. They can’t tell Nazis not to drive on that road anymore than the city can, assuming this city is in the United States anyway, but a Café owner could absolutely tell those same Nazis in that same city to not come in. Wouldn’t even have to give a reason for it. That’s fine, cafes exist everywhere and if you wanted to open one that catered specifically to Nazis, the law isn’t going to stop you.
I think we have knee jerk reactions when it comes to services like Cloudflare or Patreon disallowing certain people. To be honest, I tried to make a good case for why they should, but my best isn’t a particularly strong legal argument. Cloudflare and Patreon didn’t lay the cables that connect my home to the rest of the Internet, my ISP did, with a charter from my city.
Cloudflare and Patreon are businesses that work better when there is a critical mass of people already using them. They work best at-scale and don’t leave a whole lot of room in the market for competitors, Cloudflare much less so than Patreon, so in a sense they almost feel like utilities or like they should be.
They’re not utilities though, or cafes or galleries or any of that. They are private businesses though, so in that sense they are a lot closer to the Café owner than to your ISP or electric utility or the nearest private tollway. They might be hard to replicate businesses, and the people they are kicking off might find it hard to build a parallel alternative that sticks, but that is life.
That said, I much prefer businesses that are consistent in their policy enforcement practices than ones that aren’t, that is just good business.