[everyone]

I don't think the author's argument makes sense.

Cloudflare's position is that they are neutral and will provide their services to anyone and everyone. They do not make those value judgements deciding who deserves their services or not.

The fact that they thus provide their service to booters isn't a flaw in Cloudflare's argument, in fact it's consistent with their position.

The author is implying that Cloudflare should independantly make that value judgement against a booter, rescind their services from the booter, thus allowing other booters to take that booter down? That's ridiculous. All the booters should be dealt with by some legal authority.

EDIT: So according to some comments cloudflare sometimes does decide independantly to rescind their services from some users? That would make them inconsistent in that case. The authors argument, that the solution to booting is more booting, still doesnt make sense tho imo. It's like the solution to too many guns is more guns.

[Rasbora]

I would agree with you, however please take a look at a statement from CloudFlare earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32707821

"Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems."

Booter services have been using CloudFlare for the better part of a decade, sure individual services come and go but the trend is persistent. So for booter services a decade is enough time for the rule of law to make the decision but another type of controversial platform follows it's own arbitrary timeline, and I would argue that is setting the most dangerous precedent of all, especially when the 'risk' created by a particular type of content doesn't outweigh any potential financial incentives.

[everyone]

Ok, I honestly know nothing about this topic, I just read the article and my comment is merely a critique of the original article's internal logic and nothing more.

[ALittleLight]

Cloudflare is neutral... Unless you are 8chan, Stormfront, or KiwiFarms.

It's an odd definition of neutrality that allows one to take decisive values positions.

[voidwtf]

I think it would be intellectually dishonest to imply that there is no objective “bad”. At some point it goes beyond yelling fire in a theater, into the realm of certain and immediate harm to the whole.

We seem capable of recognizing certain actions and behaviors as universally abhorrent. Nobody can say “Cloudflare is neutral… Unless you are CSAM”, or “Cloudflare is neutral… Unless you are a live video feed of a mass murder event”, and call it an odd definition of neutrality.

There are a lot of sick individuals out there, an unfortunate number of people unable to discern trolling from legitimate discourse, people who may be convinced to commit abhorrent acts or think that they found like minded supporters of their abhorrent behavior. It is not neutral to actively defend and support the ability of a platform to take advantage of those people and or to allow the promotion of such abhorrent behaviors.

It seems like Cloudflare finds themselves walking a tightrope across a bottomless chasm. Any misstep will have dire consequences for the future of Cloudflare and the precedence it sets for the internet as a whole. It seems at this point they have taken a path of extreme caution and attempted to weigh that against collective voice of reason.

[8note]

Those are odd definitions of neutral.

More properly, they want to b political in some way without people being able to criticise them for it. "Neutrality"

[oivey]

Cloudflare’s line seems to be where bodily harm comes into play (e.g. Kiwifarms people enabling SWATing via doxxing, stalking by mobs, etc) which is above and beyond just normal criminal activity. The situations really are not very similar.

[tjpnz]

And yet they continue to work with innumerable other services causing bodily harm. This was all about countering the negative publicity.

[charcircuit]

>enabling SWATing via doxxing

Cloudflare is still hosting other sites that let you search for people's public information. The line to me seems to be whenever a mob of people starts complaining loudly that a site should be removed. Misinformation is used by the mob to make sites look as bad as possible to try and get them removed. Since these are small sites there are not many people who know it's false. The public check wikipedia and see a biased article that reaffirms the narrative.

[dvhh]

Maybe we should redefine "neutrality" in this post-truth era