[hug]

I'm not defending Cloudflare's exact actions in this scenario, but it seems reasonable that there are cases where yes, for $10k Cloudflare is okay.

Risk can be mitigated, especially if you take care to know what the risk is, but risk mitigation and the salaries of the risk mitigation teams are not free.

The answer of "no, we will not host you unless you pay us enough money to hire people to make sure we're not breaking laws by hosting you" makes plenty of sense, and an online casino that is likely dubiously legal in many countries is definitely a place where you might use that answer.

I'd also expect there are cases where Cloudflare enter into enterprise agreements with customers, get a good hard look at exactly what's happening, and then tear up the agreement and walk away.

[_ugfj]

And all of that is fine when communicated properly. Even if OP is an unreliably narrator are we to believe they also left out some of CF's emails?

To me it looks like https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... is entirely the wrong email to send in the situation and if you are as old as I am and come from where I come from, you will have flashbacks to "reading between the lines" of the party daily in the 1980s. The real content is at the bottom:

> As we have a very short window to report back to Trust & Safety team, please let me know if you can make time tomorrow

Big red flashing lights: the right questions are 1) why is T&S involved at all 2) What are their concerns which forces such a hurried deadline? 3) What are the consequences of missing this deadline.

The right email would start with something like this:

> Providing services to your business constitutes serious legal risk to Cloudflare. We are happy to work with you in the future if you are buying an Enterprise plan. As we need to commit significant resources to accommodate you, we need an annual commitment. Otherwise, with much regret we need to terminate our services provided to you as it is our right per Terms on date/time. ("We may at our sole discretion terminate your user account or Suspend or terminate your use or access to the Service at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all.")

> This plan would also include these features:

[dmatech]

T&S departments generally exist for one reason: to manage reputational risk. This sometimes involves legal risk, but it usually just means preventing relentless hit pieces about your company enabling something portrayed as horrible. This can result in customers and even employees leaving if the media is relentless enough.

Companies take risks if the reward is considered good enough. In this case, that reward is income from the customer (who can still be dropped if the hit pieces start getting published).