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.
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.
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).