{"id":66933,"date":"2022-09-02T09:02:06","date_gmt":"2022-09-02T09:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/?p=66933"},"modified":"2022-09-02T09:02:06","modified_gmt":"2022-09-02T09:02:06","slug":"cloudflare-rejects-role-as-internet-or-piracy-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/?p=66933","title":{"rendered":"Cloudflare Rejects Role as Internet or Piracy Police"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"cloudflareIn 2017, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince decided to terminate the account<\/a> of the controversial neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer.<\/p>\n

\u201cI woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet,\u201d he wrote at the time.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s lawyers later explained that the move was meant as an \u201cintellectual exercise\u201d to start a conversation regarding censorship and free speech on the internet. However, external parties took this discussion in a different direction than the one Prince had planned.<\/p>\n

For years, Cloudflare had a policy not to remove any accounts without a court order, so when it kicked out Daily Stormer and later 8Chan as well<\/a>, eyebrows were raised. For example, copyright holders wondered why the company could terminate these accounts but not those of the most notorious pirate sites.<\/p>\n

Cloudflare\u2019s seemingly arbitrary termination choices were repeatedly cited in policy discussions and copyright litigation<\/a>. In addition, it triggered an ongoing wave of termination requests.<\/p>\n

Over the past few days, Cloudflare found itself in the midst of a \u2018cancel\u2019 discussion again, with people calling on the company to disconnect the harassment-linked forum Kiwi Farms. This prompted Matthew Prince to clarify the company\u2019s stance<\/a> on offensive, abhorrent, and copyright-infringing content. <\/p>\n

No More Voluntary Terminations<\/h2>\n

The company makes a clear distinction between the various services it offers. When Cloudflare is the primary hosting platform it leaves plenty of room for voluntary terminations<\/a>. For its CDN, security, and core Internet infrastructure services, voluntary actions will no longer happen.<\/p>\n

This strict line in the sand is the result of discussions with policymakers worldwide. Cloudflare sees itself as an Internet utility that should remain as neutral as possible, even when its customers do despicable things.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust as the telephone company doesn\u2019t terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. <\/p>\n

\u201cTo be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn\u2019t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again,\u201d Prince adds, referring to the earlier terminations. <\/p>\n

Wave of Requests<\/h2>\n

While many people applauded Cloudflare for booting out The Daily Stormer and 8Chan, these decisions were actively used against the company. Not just by copyright holders, but also by authoritarian regimes. <\/p>\n

\u201cIn a deeply troubling response, after both terminations we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes attempting to have us terminate security services for human rights organizations \u2014 often citing the language from our own justification back to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

As we suggested back in 2017, Cloudflare essentially handed out free ammunition to adversaries<\/a>, who could use the voluntary terminations as an argument to request more restrictions. That includes kicking out pirate sites. <\/p>\n

Cloudflare is clearly uncomfortable with this position. The company stresses that voluntary terminations will no longer happen for sites that use its CDN or security services. Instead, those demanding action will need to get a court order. <\/p>\n

Slippery Termiation Slope<\/h2>\n

In recent years various courts have already ordered Cloudflare to block pirate sites. The company has complied with these orders. However, it vows to fight cases where core infrastructure is at play with tooth and nail. This includes a recent order in Italy<\/a>, that required the company to block pirate sites on its public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, these cases are becoming more common where largely copyright holders are attempting to get a ruling in one jurisdiction and have it apply worldwide to terminate core Internet technology services and effectively wipe content offline,\u201d Prince writes.<\/p>\n

These global injunctions would set a dangerous precedent, Cloudflare\u2019s CEO says, as it would allow the most restrictive regimes to control what content should be available online. Preventing bad precedents is the prime reason why Cloudflare believes it is important not to intervene voluntarily in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cHolding this line we believe is fundamental for the healthy operation of the global Internet. But each showing of discretion across our security or core Internet technology services weakens our argument in these important cases.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, Prince doesn\u2019t want another Daily Stormer or 8Chan that can come back to haunt the company in the future. This means that The Pirate Bay and other pirate customers have little to worry about, at least for the time being.<\/p>\n

From: TF<\/a>, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.<\/p>\n

Powered by WPeMatico<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2017, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince decided to terminate the account of the controversial neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer. \u201cI woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet,\u201d he wrote at the time. The company\u2019s lawyers later explained that the move was meant as an \u201cintellectual exercise\u201d to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66934,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[308],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-torrent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/66934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}