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by avian 1787 days ago
How is that different from a hosting provider that has to address legal complaints regarding spam, copyright infringement, etc. on their servers? Just like a hosting provider, they specifically have a relationship with the website owner to provide the reverse proxy service. It's not like they can say "we don't know who or how our service is being used".

It seems to me that if they want to be in this business they have to deal with these liabilities and complications, not hide behind some vague "our hands are tied" language.
3 comments
studentrob 1787 days ago
Presumably if illegal content is not taken down by the customer then the host cancels the service, right? Otherwise the host risks liability. That's different from revealing the IP of a customer which requires a court order.
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eru 1787 days ago
You have a point, but I assume those businesses' lawyers understand this better than our armchair speculation here.
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lelanthran 1787 days ago
> How is that different from a hosting provider

If their argument is "we only retransmit what we get, with caching" then they are in the same place liability-wise as the phone providers ("We only retransmit what we et, with caching").

In other words, a common carrier.

Hosting is different. For exmaple, Youtube is not liable for what their users upload. They comply with takedown notices because they host the content, not the user.

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breakingcups 1787 days ago
But in a way, they actively host the content. The fact that their server periodically retrieves new content from a different backend makes no difference. The page sits on their hard drives and is server by their servers when I visit that domain. It's always been a very, very thin argument and it has gotten even thinner with the likes of Cloudflare Pages and Workers.

Cloudflare is just a huge company actively ignoring abuse complaints and somehow they are getting away with it. It even helps their PR to a certain market segment.

They even still host kiwifarms, a board that is primarily known for its vicous harassment of people and is known to have driven multiple innocent people to suicide.

I consider CloudFlare a bad actor at this point and I wish the other big names around them would too. They are subsidizing crime with VC money.

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