The CEO of a pro-free speech San Francisco-based content delivery network and website protection company Cloudflare has made a decision he described afterward as “dangerous.”
White nationalist site The Daily Stormer, which helped organize the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that erupted in violence and resulted in three people dying, has now been dropped from multiple online platforms under pressure by activists for “supporting” the bigoted site. Both GoDaddy and Google have booted the Neo-Nazi site, which has now taken to the dark web, while Reddit, Facebook and Discord have banned them. Now, Cloudflare, the site’s last “protector” which has come under fire for continuing to offer its services, has decided to join its colleagues and terminate its contract with the site.
“Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous,” wrote Prince. “I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the internet. No one should have that power.”
Here’s the key text of the email:
This was my decision. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I’d had enough.
Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked [sic] with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major internet infrastructure company.
Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.
Zero Day‘s Zack Whittacker highlights Cloudfare’s reputation for having “an absolutist approach to free speech,” and which initially refused to boot The Daily Stormer. The network doesn’t actually host content, but rather provides protection to sites and Prince himself has said in the past that he is troubled by the idea of companies like his “making moral judgments on what’s good and bad.”
“If you have companies making moral judgments on what’s good and bad, that worries me a lot,” Prince told ZDNet in a 2015 interview, Whittacker notes. “If a final court order comes down and says we can’t do something — governments have tanks and guns.”
He said in the interview that he didn’t “ever want to be in the position” where the company should have to decide between “good content and bad content. … If a court comes and says you can’t provide service to someone, we’ll do everything we can within the law to challenge the order.”
So, as Prince suggests in his email, the company may have now set a “dangerous” precedent going forward. Will they now start banning all bigoted, hateful sites run by “assholes,” including those on the Left?
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