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by lelanthran 1786 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.

1 comments

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.