Cloudfare aren't a government. They aren't a democracy. I don't know why some people seem to think they should act any differently.
If you own a notice board in the real world, and someone put something horrible on it, you would take it down. This is no different.
They are comparable to a self-storage place you might keep your boat. Or an office you might rent to house your business. But they are not anything like a utility.
And Cloudflare isn't a utility. I agree with Cloudflare's decision. I hope whichever host 8chan runs to will do the same. Free speech is not a suicide pact.
Broadly speaking, there's (at least) two forms of net neutrality:
1) Different classes of traffic will be treated identically and not throttled indiscriminately (VOIP vs web content vs bittorrent etc.)
2) Content cannot be arbitrarily restricted by a technical provider.
If there was substantial abuse with their platform based upon technical reasons in case 1, I could see that as cause for termination.
Their arguments against denying service to 8chan are based upon case 2. Given where Cloudflare sits in the internet infrastructure layer, their supporting a pro-net neutrality position enforced upon ISPs while not applying that standard to themselves strikes me as more than a tad hypocritical.
Not everything has to be so black and white.
Your opening premise isn't even true. CF has nothing near a monopoly on CDNs.
And if your noticeboard is inciting nearly weekly mass homicides, maybe the noticeboard you're trying to support is a shitty noticeboard.
I get the mourning about senseless death, but this is basically killing the messenger. And I do indeed believe that people trying to get these platforms shut down don't really care about it too much and have different motives. Maybe just trying to prove a point.
> A lot of not-so-subtle support for 8chan leaking into this thread.
I hope I am not supple about when I say that I think the move is idiotic.
