zlacker

While I'm sure few of us would have controversial domains, let's remember that Cloudflare have removed the DNS records of sites that they didn't like in the past[0].

[0] - https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

>>conver+(OP)
Very true, but the risk of using them should be weighed against the risk of not using them. Don't forget that pretty much all other registrars were much more eager than Cloudflare to shut down Daily Stormer, and expose you to Zoho-type risk that Cloudflare claims to mitigate.

>>conver+(OP)
That's misleading. They removed the records of one site. Not "sites". And they did it because that site was claiming that CloudFlare providing them services meant that CloudFlare secretly supported their (hate-based) ideology.

And it's also worth pointing out that CloudFlare wasn't the only company terminating services for Storm Front. GoDaddy dropped them, then Google dropped them (and their YouTube account), then Tucows dropped them after just a few hours, and then finally CloudFlare dropped them.

Or to put it another way, CloudFlare has dropped one single site. Pretty much any other competing service will have dropped numerous sites. CloudFlare's dropping of The Daily Stormer is really only interesting in that it was a violation of CloudFlare's previously-stated policies of only dropping clients that are breaking the law.

>>Meekro+U6
Except that Cloudflare terminated Daily Stormer after allowing terrorist groups to operate under the guise of "free speech":

https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/cloudflare-and-...

>>eridiu+98
And, perhaps more importantly, Cloudflare admitted that was a mistake and promised that it wouldn't happen again. (IIRC.)

>>eridiu+98
You failed to mention that the decision to drop them was made unilaterally by the CEO, and he said it was because he woke up in a bad mood that day. That was why people were talking about it; all you have to do is get on the bad side of someone at the company and they'll try to effectively erase you from the internet, and people will defend it by saying "it's a private business, they can't be forced to host anyone". It was a very visible case of a gatekeeper to a large portion of the internet showing that they're willing to decide what information people can see.

>>aestet+l8
Can anyone explain why they downvoted me instead of just downvoting?

>>Ajedi3+Xa
Can you quote a source for that? I'd very much like the assurance for a claim like that.

>>trioda+3k
Yep! Here you go: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/cloudflare-ceo-t...

Matthew Prince is a human like everybody else, and honestly, I would rather have him guarding my back than a lot of other tech CEOs.

>>aestet+Bc
I didn’t, but I can provide some advice since I see this type of comment and nobody really gets advice on this kind of thing. Your comment wasn’t inflammatory — it was factual. However, it only contained a fact, and in that fact, the wording sounded like you were being not only factual, but perhaps a little too stuck to your guns.

Controversial comments on HN are generally appreciated as long as they have both commentary and supporting evidence. The commentary part is key. Many of us have read HN for years and are very well aware of these events. Thus, posting about them isn’t news to us — it’s just noise. A new take on it or an interpretation from you is always welcome, but just “spreading the news,” is somewhat the antithesis of Hacker News in the comments.

>>Shank+Pm
Thanks for the source. Still, I'm getting mixed signals from that article, I guess he did what he did and regretted it? Have they taken steps to prevent something like that from happening again?

>>dx87+xb
> all you have to do is get on the bad side of someone at the company and they'll try to effectively erase you from the internet

This is such ridiculous hyperbole and willfully ignores the reality of what Storm Front is and what they stand for. The CEO absolutely made the right call and Cloudflare has done just fine since then.

>>Ajedi3+Xa
I've been trying to watch these issues and not seen anything that suggests they won't do it again. If you have some evidence of this, please post it.

In fact I think it more important to point out that the incident proved they can and will do such a thing, and will have less of an argument should someone stick a piece of paper to their head and tell them to do it more often.

I like cloudflare and appreciate all these cool things they are doing with with other's (Google's, Micorsoft's and Baidu's ?) money... however the old playbook of get big and entrenched then start to bleed your captive customers is getting rather old.

Wall street pressure has made godaddy much worse in my experience, and I have seen nothing that says cloudflare has done anything to prevent these things from happening again.

Whichever registrar is keeping stormfront as a customer is likely more resilient. (would like to know which (tucows?) reseller is the one.)

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I hope cloudflare is already setting up ways to split their company into cloudflare US, cloudflare CA, cloudflare UK, cloudflare JP, IN, etc etc.. as I think it's the only way to prevent mass takedowns that are likely coming in the future.

>>conver+(OP)
I have to admit, the cloudflare CEO unilaterally dropping a site - even a site as abhorrent as Daily Stormer - gave me pause. Still makes me a bit wary about cloudflare. It wasn't so much that they dropped the nazis, but more of how they did it.

>>conver+(OP)
That decision I support. An actually terrible idea they had though was to forward abuse complaints directly to the accused site owner, complete with personal information about the reporter:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/05/cloudflare-chang...

But my biggest concern is that CloudFlare is centralizing the internet way too much. If most connections to smaller websites are proxied through CloudFlare, the web becomes very centralized: all your connections go either to other giants like Google/Facebook/Netflix, or to Cloudflare.

>>Shank+7n
For the record, when I posted that comment, its score was in the negative, and now it's positive again. So I guess it was just a matter of waiting for more people to read it.

>>steven+oy
Days after posting about the need for cloudflare (and others) to decentralize / split up; and there is this article in the Guardian for the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/30/we-can...

Equating cloudflare tech with nazi bouncers, and killing. Needing to be used to shutdown sites.

with things like this: >> Cloudflare has built “edge servers” – data centres that store content locally. There are 30 in Europe, including one in London and one in Manchester. The British government cannot regulate the worldwide web, but it could enforce the law in Britain. The anti-fascists at Hope not Hate begged ministers to make Cloudflare’s British operations comply with anti-Nazi legislation.

>> Cloudflare, by contrast, is enabling men who want to kill, not argue.

There was a time when the tech was not easily understood, and the argument of dumb pipes was kind of legit. It seems that time is over, in no small part because tech has not been sticking to their principals (imho).