Terminating Service for 8Chan

I don't know if the article was updated or what, but near the end:

"Late Sunday, following hours of public criticism, Cloudflare announced a major reversal, saying 8chan had gone too far and “repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.” Its access to Cloudflare services was scheduled to terminate at midnight Pacific time, making it more vulnerable to a potentially crippling cyberattack."

Well, they're at least making their position clear here. They are not a government or a public forum. As such, they can decide who and what they will support on the internet. Can't argue with their decision on that point.

If you build a system that is technically possible for someone to censor, particularly if you make it easy to do (and in fact where not doing so would cost them potentially billions of dollars in market cap in an upcoming IPO, recruiting, sales, vendors, etc), you shouldn’t be at all surprised when they do censor. It is interesting that Cloudflare has only really censored two sites (dailystormer and 8chan) outside of a fairly clearly articulated terms of service. There are clearly a large number of sites on Cloudflare which are a net liability to them and always will be, so the “free speech” stance is genuine.

He should fire his PR. Terrible writing and hard to read. And probably 4-5 times longer than needed.

Also it is bad idea to get political. And I feel that a lot of those companies are gonna get punished in the next few years.

And he didn't managed to even make his case. He accused 8 chan of lawlessness while never actually stating which law they broke.

Just say they are too much trouble and be done with it, without sounding fake.

This is great news.

There will be lots of people who are frustrated by this. They may say that Cloudflare shouldn't remove content unless they are legally required. Or that a CDN like Cloudflare is a platform layer, deep in the stack, and that it shouldn't be making decisions based on content. That they are a essentially a utility, and that they should provide the the same service to everyone.

But at the end of the day, companies are run by people. And those people should consider the positive and negative concequences of the services they provide. It is the moral thing to do. It is the right thing to do. It is the courageous thing to do.

That doesn't mean they must block every potentially bad actor. And they don't need to block based explicitly on content. Here, the line was drawn at "platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design." But when situations arise that cause decision makers at an organization to re-consider providing their services to their customers, they should take that opportunity to re-evaluate. They should ask, "Do we want to be hosting this?"

In this case, they said "No."

Maybe some other customers will leave, afraid of being kicked off next. They should take that into account. If you think your service is sufficiently like 8Chan, you should probably leave Cloudflare. Or if you think Cloudflare's decision was arbitrary and that worries you, you should leave.

But maybe others will be happy that their CDN doesn't need to be associated with hosting 8Chan's content. I know I feel that way.

Maybe the goodwill you receive will lead to more financial success. But you'll probably never know. In all likelihood, so long as your customers aren't leaving in droves after you kick someone off your platform, you'll never know if the decision was the right financial decision.

You'll probably never know if it was a net positive or negative on your balance sheet. But you might sleep better at night. And maybe sites that enable the propagate hate will find it a little bit harder to survive. And I think that's great.