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0 pointsTraster6y ago0 comments

This is a very strange idea of what Free Speech is. The reason Free Speech is related to government is that government has a monopoly on violence. Government can turn up with guns at your house and stop you speaking in a way that no other body can. What is happening here is very different.

Cloudflare isn't preventing anyone from saying anything. All that is happening is Cloudflare is using it's freedom of association not to associate with this website. This has nothing to do with 8Chan's ability to publish what they want - only their ability to use Cloudflare's services to do so. As the article mentions - because the US has the principle of Free Speech enshrined in law, 8chan has the ability to go and use other services, or to develop the services that Cloudflare provided. This will not impact 8chan's ability to publish whatever they like.

Now there is a theoretical point of view, that if a company has a monopoly - it is effectively able to police speech, but that's absolutely not the case here, as is demonstrated in the past by companies going elsewhere to exercise their right.

What is being proposed as an understanding of Free Speech is not allowing private individuals from refusing to service to you. This would seem to be mandating someone to act - which is a principle quite far away from any law I've heard of.

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Ajedi326y ago

Cloudflare may not be a monopoly, but they don't necessarily need to be a monopoly to be able to effectively police speech. A duopoly or oligopoly can be just as effective at that task, provided all competitors have similar rules about what sort of speech they disallow.

Now maybe we're not quite at that point yet (after all, the Daily Stormer did eventually find a CDN that would take them), but we may very well be getting close; there are only so many CDNs big enough to effectively shrug off large-scale DDOS attacks after all.

You also have to consider how difficult it is to match the quality of service provided by Cloudflare, and the hassle involved in switching to a new CDN. Cloudflare's refusal to service some organizations on the basis of ideology might have a chilling effect on Free Speech, even if it's not an insurmountable barrier.

I agree there is a balance between Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association. The question is: where do we draw the line?

kickopotomus6y ago

Nobody has a right to a CDN or a right to DDOS protection. Cloudflare is a private company offering a service in exchange for money. They may deny service to whomever they wish (with exceptions for certain protected classes). Political leanings and ideologies do not constitute a protected class. Neither Cloudflare, nor Google, nor FaceBook, nor Reddit, nor HN for that matter have any legal or moral obligation to grant a platform to anyone. A private platform reserves all rights to the content on their platform. If you have an issue with how that is policed or moderated then you are free to create your own competing service.

Ajedi326y ago

You're falling back on the legal argument again. Again: Free Speech is not a law, it's a principle.

Sure, even without a CDN a sufficiently well-funded organization could spend millions of dollars on the infrastructure necessary to resist a powerful DDOS attack. But if that's enough in your mind to satisfy the principle of free speech, then you're essentially saying that it's okay if it costs millions of dollars to speak freely on the internet. I'm not sure that's a good policy.

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themagician6y ago

Free Speech doesn’t require a CDN. Lol. It’s not like the First Amendment comes with a 99.999% uptime guarantee.

Some of you are so dense. Free speech is about not being dragged off in the middle of the night and sent to a gulag.

There’s no fine line here, no slippery slope. Everyone on 8chan is free to continue publishing whatever they want. It just won’t be published over a high availability CDN. It also won’t show up in Times Square.

Ajedi326y ago

There is a fine line, and I think that's easily illustrated with a few hypothetical counterexamples.

If you truly believe that "free speech is about not being dragged off in the middle of the night and sent to a gulag", and that that's all it's about for you, then would you, for example, be okay with a law stating that social media companies in the US are required to automatically filter any content critical of actions taken by the US military, and not display that content to people inside the US?

Yes, that's an extreme example, and yes it'd be illegal under the current US constitution, but it would be consistent with the extremely narrow definition of Free Speech you specified in your previous comment.

So, assuming that's not actually where you draw the line, where do you draw it? How much suppression of speech are you willing to tolerate before you would consider it unacceptable?

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Ajedi326y ago

I agree there is a balance between Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association. The question is: where do we draw the line?

kickopotomus6y ago

Ajedi326y ago

You're falling back on the legal argument again. Again: Free Speech is not a law, it's a principle.

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themagician6y ago

Free Speech doesn’t require a CDN. Lol. It’s not like the First Amendment comes with a 99.999% uptime guarantee.

Some of you are so dense. Free speech is about not being dragged off in the middle of the night and sent to a gulag.

Ajedi326y ago

There is a fine line, and I think that's easily illustrated with a few hypothetical counterexamples.

So, assuming that's not actually where you draw the line, where do you draw it? How much suppression of speech are you willing to tolerate before you would consider it unacceptable?

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse