Yesterday, Cloudflare ceased to provide caching and DDoS protection services for a far-right blog, the Daily Stormer, following claims by the latter that Cloudflare secretly support their ideology. Cloudflare’s CEO has published a lengthy and thoughtful analysis of their decision, beginning
Now, having made that decision, let me explain why it’s so dangerous.
One interesting tidbit concerns the nature of the pressure Cloudflare was under
“In fact, in the case of the Daily Stormer, the initial requests we received to terminate their service came from hackers who literally said: “Get out of the way so we can DDoS this site off the Internet.”
In an internal e-mail obtained by Gizmodo, Prince was blunt about his reasons for terminating Daily Stormer:
This was my decision. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I’d had enough.
Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.
Read the whole blog post on Cloudfare.com and Prince’s internal e-mail on Gizmodo.
Update note: This article was updated on 18th August to add the quotes from and link to the e-mail obtained by Gizmodo.