[the_mitsuhiko]

I absolute believe that Vercel does not like to host it and they have the freedom to restrict the service. But I _am_ curious which term of the TOS it violated.

[cldellow]

Vercel's terms are at https://vercel.com/legal/terms. A handful of possible violations from section 6, Acceptable Use:

- The Services may only be used for lawful purposes.

- You shall not attempt to undermine the security or integrity of computing systems or networks of Vercel, its partners, or any other person, and must not attempt to gain unauthorized access.

- You may not use the services or Vercel's infrastructure for proxying, scraping, to create virtual private networks, or to create virtual private servers.

Reasonable people might disagree whether 12ft.io is being unlawful, undermining the integrity of a computing system, gaining unauthorized access, or proxying/scraping. So the TOS also says:

- The final decision of whether an account is in violation of any of these acceptable use terms is at the sole discretion of Vercel.

[echelon]

> - The final decision of whether an account is in violation of any of these acceptable use terms is at the sole discretion of Vercel.

Seems like it's not safe to host on Vercel, then. They're giving themselves absolute control with zero recourse.

Looks like you're opted into arbitration too. Classic hostile, anti-consumer behavior.

Don't they know who they exist to serve?

[tptacek]

Every mainstream cloud platform has substantially the same term in their user agreement, including the big hyperscalers. Abuse is a constant challenge for cloud providers; it would be an untenable problem if abusers had legal recourse to account closure.

[the_mitsuhiko]

> You may not use the services or Vercel's infrastructure for proxying, scraping

I think that's pretty clear cut then.

[cldellow]

Looking at archive.org, I think this was only added in their most recent May 1, 2023 TOS update.

He might be the reason it now exists in the TOS. :)

[yegle]

I just realized that archive.org might also in violation of Vercel's ToS given its ability to bypass paywall.

[SahAssar]

Why would they care? They are not hosted on Vercel.

[randombits0]

Since the service alters the data before delivery, a strong argument can be made that it’s not a proxy per se. Say I did something similar with the goal of assisting vision-impaired users. That’s not just a proxy.

It’s the weekend. He’ll talk to them on Monday.

[xp84]

> a strong argument can be made that it’s not a proxy per se.

I suppose, although lots of proxies make changes.

Either way, he should probably change the URL that it uses if he intends to argue it's not a proxy of any kind. ;) I still have a tab open with an article, and the URL is:

  https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww...