"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.