On the one hand, Cloudflare crying crocodile tears for their policy decisions isn’t remotely moving. If anything, their plea for US intervention feels incredibly insincere given that their business has been to defend literal Nazis and Pirates alike for decades, and if you’re going to build a business out of defending bad actors, well, you best be prepared for the consequences.

That being said, they’re absolutely right that these broad, automated blocks aren’t acceptable for the internet as a whole - especially when a ruling is applicable regionally or globally. Blocking an entire IP range or service provider because of a handful of bad actors on their service is incredibly excessive, akin to barricading off an entire neighborhood because one apartment is a crack den, i.e. stupidly disproportionate. If countries are having an issue with a company routinely and willfully allowing bad actors to prosper, the solution is simply to bar that company from operating within their jurisdiction commercially.

Yet the IT dinosaur in me reads that statement above, and I ultimately find myself back at where I’ve been for years: for a globally distributed network, the only way to effectively punish an operator like Cloudflare is to block its entire IP range, despite the harms innocent customers and users will incur. And I can’t quite figure out a way past that under the current piecemeal system of the internet and the financial incentives for consolidation and centralization.

We have to punish bad actors, but when said actor commands a significant swath of the legitimate internet, you either have to harm a disproportionate amount of legitimate traffic in blocking them, or admit they’re too big and important for a government to intervene against. The former is bad, but the latter is infinitely worse.

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wbl 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The courts can absolutely get Cloudflare to comply with orders. The only reason this doesn't happen is that the people asking for the blocking come with a list of IPs.

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stego-tech 3 days ago | parent [-]

You’re eSplaining my own argument back to me. Cloudflare’s whinging is they shouldn’t be required to block entire swaths of IP ranges because they have legitimate customer traffic there; their opponents (rightly) state that because of how Cloudflare and the internet works, the only real way to stop these piracy streams are wholesale service blocks, because of how easily specific IP or domain blocks can be bypassed.

The centralization of power is the problem, and as I say near the end:

> …I can’t quite figure out a way past that under the current piecemeal system of the internet and the financial incentives for consolidation and centralization.

	▲	wbl 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Cloudflare could be told to kick the streams off and they would stop

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mikkupikku 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Defend literal pirates" - imagine if it was the opposite; if the only way to keep a site on the internet without being ddosed into oblivion was to use Cloudflare but also they only permit sites which are approved of by corporate interests. That would be very dystopian.

The root problem of course is their de facto monopoly status, as gatekeepers of the internet (if they aren't secretly an NSA run company, the NSA is probably very jealous of what they've done), but this would be so much worse if they decided to play internet editor.

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kmeisthax 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Cloudflare does not have a monopoly on internet hosting, or even just web application firewalls or DDoS protection. The only thing different about them is that:

1. They have a moderately generous free tier, which they'll aggressively try to upsell you out of the moment they smell money in your wallet.

2. They have an anti-censorship policy that is indistinguishable from the policies of a "bulletproof" hosting company, which means all the DDoS vendors they protect you from are also paying Cloudflare.

This leads me to believe that Cloudflare's protection is less "stringent defense of free speech" and more "you wouldn't want something to happen to that precious website of yours, right?" Like, there's no free speech argument for keeping DDoS vendors online - it's a patently obvious own goal. If someone is selling censorship as a service, then it's obvious, at least to me, that silencing them and them alone would actually make others more free to speak.

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wbl 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Akamai, CloudFront, whatever Googles service is, a bunch of other ones I can't think of compete in the same market. Cloudflare obviously is good at what they do but there decently are many fine CDN/DDOs prevention companies.

	▲	mikkupikku 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		If we are considering the social implications of Cloudflare being pressured to deplatform anybody who disrespects intellectual property, then why should we simultaneously assume that the other handful of companies offering a comparable service wouldn't be similarly pressured?

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stego-tech 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

…I find it interesting that you edited the quote to remove their defense of Nazis. Like, that’s just a very odd decision to make when quoting somebody.

And you’re covering the ground I already laid in the original comment:

> …the only way to effectively punish an operator like Cloudflare is to block its entire IP range, despite the harms innocent customers and users will incur. And I can’t quite figure out a way past that under the current piecemeal system of the internet and the financial incentives for consolidation and centralization.

I don’t need eSplaining of my own argument.

	▲	inemesitaffia 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Taylor Swift is now on so...
	▲	mikkupikku 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If you can't defend the premise of knocking Anna's Archive off the internet without hiding behind the tarpit of demanding the conversation be about Nazis, that is extremely telling.

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immibis 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I knew about the Nazis, but I wasn't aware Cloudflare defended literal sea pirates? When did that happen? I guess the US Navy?

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sammy2255 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

They don't. And actually, quite hilariously, Somalian pirates raided the Kenyan data center that Cloudflare have their Kenyan PoP in (7 years ago). https://old.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/comments/837c4c/somalian...

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stego-tech 3 days ago | parent [-]

I had missed this and find it deeply hilarious that actual meatspace pirates raided a company’s datacenter that protects digital pirates.

Also, just for folks seemingly confused by my words in the original post: I got no beef with digital piracy myself, just more pointing out that if your company is willfully protecting hate speech (like Nazis) and piracy sites, well, you’re courting a very specific kind of response, and whining about receiving that response after the fact is not exactly sympathetic.

	▲	sammy2255 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah it's not true. It was a joke /r/woosh

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stego-tech 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Folks keep confusing where I used the term “literal” in that sentence. I said “literal Nazis and pirates”, not Nazis and literal pirates.

It’s why I staunchly refuse to touch Cloudflare for fucking anything. When your company defends a group whose ethos is genocide, you’ve lost me forever, free speech be damned.

	▲	kbelder 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		And when your ethos is censorship, you've lost me.