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.
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.
Making the choice twice now calls into question hundreds of other properties they work with, and may open the floodgates for all that criticism they have shielded against so far.
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.
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.
This isn't about "supporting" someone's views. This is about simply allowing one to speak. Otherwise Google should be held liable for every single illegal thing that happens on their platform (and there are ton of those).
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.
That's kind of the point.
Cloudflare and social media co's naturally want to be protected as a platform. If they start controlling the content in an ad hoc it's a lot harder for them to claim that.
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.
