No Stupid Questions

If you have to be dragged kicking and screaming by public outcry before you cancel Nazis, you support Nazis.

If the only way you can say that Cloudflare actively supported nazis was because they didn’t cancel them, it sounds to me like Cloudflare didn’t actively support nazis. Why is it so hard to say “Cloudflare didn’t cancel nazis” instead of lying and saying they “actively supported” them?

But you know what happened as well as I do, so your framing of events that way is interesting...

Yes, I do, which is why I’m confused as to why any reasonable person would think that Cloudflare’s actions here are in any way problematic.

Cloudflare considers themselves to be akin to a public utility. Do you think that public utilities should be able to refuse to provide their services to law-abiding nazis? I’m talking phone lines, electricity, gas for heat, water, etc.. If so, why? Should it be limited to nazis? How do you ensure that only nazis are prevented from having running water and electricity?

Because ultimately this comes down to a company treating themselves as a public utility, and structuring their processes for determining if they would offer services to a company or individual under that basis, and then, having an established process, being resistant to making an exception to that process to refuse service to a group of nazis. Cloudflare said that there was a huge uptick in the amount of takedown requests that they received after they took down 8chan and The Daily Stormer. If their process were amended to prohibit certain kinds of legal speech, they would face increased pressure to take down even more sites, and not just sites belonging to nazis.

Again, this is all about the ability to have a website on the internet and not about being able to have a platform on social media, Youtube, Spotify, etc.. The sites, effectively, are buildings, but the internet is like the land. I’m not saying anyone should be required to let a nazi in their building. Criticizing Facebook for not de-platforming nazis is fine. This is about access to what are effectively essential public services.

I see being able to run a website as an extension of the right to free speech. Because hosting a website on the internet requires the involvement of companies - domain name registrars, DNS hosting services, ISPs and the network, etc. - if you are consistently refused one of these services by these companies, you’re effectively denied this right. If you try to go start up your own domain registrar, you still have to deal with a company - the domain name registry. If you try to start up your own domain name registry, you still have to deal with a company - ICANN. The assets of these companies are protected by the government, and if you were to try to force your site onto the internet, the government would stop you. This probably isn’t technically government censorship, but it serves that same effective purpose. No, it isn’t government directed, but being directed by the market is just as bad, and in some cases, worse.

If you’re fine with a company refusing service in this instance, with the rationale being because they fundamentally disagree with the site’s content, it follows that it should be fine for such a company to refuse service to sites of politicians they don’t like (or who are in a race with one of their bigger customers or donors), anti-fascist forums, far-left and far-right forums, sites providing information on abortions, sites dedicated to open source projects that they or one of their stakeholders don’t like, storefronts for products they dislike, etc..

Maybe you think that would all be fine? I don’t. I think that sounds like something out of a dystopian late stage capitalism short story, and I want nothing to do with it.

If you’re not at least in agreement that it wouldn’t be fine, then I don’t know what to say. Why do you disagree?

If you are in agreement: it follows that access to internet services should generally be treated like access to public utilities, even if the companies aren’t technically considered to be public utilities. Legally prohibiting such companies from refusing service without actually classifying the companies as public utilities would itself be a violation of free speech. But it is still reasonable for them to behave like public utilities.

And given that this is reasonable, saying “Cloudflare supports nazis because they behaved like a public utility and didn’t ban these sites run by nazis, even though there was a huge public outcry” is a nonsensical statement. It’s basically “Cloudflare supports nazis because they did something reasonable, even when nazis were involved.” By that logic, “Cloudflare supports Hillary Clinton because they provide services to her site” is a reasonable statement. Does Cloudflare support every site that they provide services to? No, obviously not. Do they support every site that they’ve refused to honor a takedown request against? Again, no. Why is that answer different when nazis are involved?

I was looking for a quote from the EFF and found this article that covers the topic from Cloudflare’s perspective: https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/ - it’s worth a read, IMO.

Anyway, here’s the EFF bit:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has taken a stand that what it calls “intermediaries”—services like Cloudflare and GoDaddy that do not generate the content themselves—should not be adjudicating what speech is acceptable. The EFF has a strong presumption that most speech, even vile speech, should be allowed, but when illegal activity, like inciting violence or defamation, occurs, the proper channel to deal with it is the legal system. “It seems to me that the last thing we should be doing is having intermediaries deputizing themselves to make decisions about what’s OK,” says Corynne McSherry, legal director of the EFF. “What law enforcement will tell you is that it’s better for them to be able to keep track of potentially dangerous groups if they’re not pushed down into the dark web.” She adds: “I want my Nazis where I can see them.”

Another topic the article covers - not in EFF’s words, but in the CEO of Cloudflare’s - is that beyond just the “intermediaries” like Cloudflare making these calls, you have vigilante cyberattackers who DDOS the sites of people they don’t agree with:

Prince spoke about the peril posed by DDoS attacks. We might all agree, Prince argued, that content like the Daily Stormer shouldn’t be online, but the mechanism for silencing those voices should not be vigilante hackers.

I agree with this, as well as with the EFF’s take, and as far as I can tell there simply isn’t a rational criticism of Cloudflare’s resistance to banning The Daily Stormer that doesn’t literally require accepting that free speech isn’t all that important.