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by vmoore 1232 days ago
> In an era where the internet is becoming increasingly important, it's crucial that governments ensure that companies like Cloudflare are not able to use their power to limit access to information or censor speech

Cloudflare should be seen as an ISP. An ISP is neutral and doesn't care about what content flows through its network. My only gripe is Cloudflare has to /store/ content on its servers, so it's not really an ISP in the traditional sense.
2 comments
laughinghan 1232 days ago
I strongly disagree with the analogy between CDNs and ISPs. ISPs operate on the user-side, they have no business filtering what the user sees. CDNs operate on the server-side, they have the power and responsibility to decide who they want to do business with, and to not provide services to harmful customers—I'm sure we agree ISPs shouldn't provide services to harmful customers either (spam, malware, phishing, etc).
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cesarb 1232 days ago
> My only gripe is Cloudflare has to /store/ content on its servers, so it's not really an ISP in the traditional sense.

Traditionally (at least in my experience), back in the pre-HTTPS-everywhere days, ISPs often had Squid proxies, sometimes optional (had to be manually configured) and sometimes "transparent" (the ISP's router forcefully forwarded all connections matching TCP destination port 80 to the Squid proxy). IMHO, that's a close enough analogue to Cloudflare's main business.

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