While Cloudflare appears to be doing things that are meant to help everyday people, I can't help but be suspicious. This is an organization that sticks with the "we don't host" bullshit line when web sites serve up Trojans which pretend to be Adobe Flash installers. While there's more subjectivity involved with dealing with hosting the content of spammers, there is zero subjectivity involved with clear and obvious phishing sites.
First, anyone with the tiniest modicum of common sense can tell that these pretend Flash sites are absolutely not in the slightest way legitimate content.
Second, providing services in any way, shape or form is, in fact, hosting. Providing DNS? It's hosting. Providing a cached version of the site? Hosting.
So if they want to be in the business of pretending to be not-hosting, then they have to stop providing services that without which web sites would cease to function. Are they now going to claim that they're not providing meaningful services to domains registered through them, and therefore they should not be responsible for people who are doing illegal things?
On the contrary, decisions by not-my-actual-server-host to get involved in content disputes is what would drive me away as a customer. What having the tiniest modicum of common sense would tell you is that holding each middleman responsible for content they pass through is ridiculous. It is definitely a way to enforce a level of censorship that didn't work when you went to the true source of the data. Hosting someone's DNS, passing their data over your pipes, building the keyboard they type with, registering their domain, etc is not the same as supporting the content. I think you're intentionally confusing the issue by equating hosting one type of service with another.
These things are not connected. You're a customer of Cloudflare by choice. If you use Cloudflare to hide your nefarious activities, then you SHOULD be inconvenienced by Cloudflare. Otherwise, you deserve no privacy so people can contact you / your actual provider properly.
Building a keyboard is one thing. Providing ongoing services for illegal activity is something entirely different. You're being disingenuous by trying to conflate those two things.
If someone hosts illegal / abusive content, then anyone that person pays to facilitate that content should be obligated to do something about that content when that party is made aware.
Illegal where? In the country where the site is hosted? In some country where Cloudflare operates? In the country of the user? In the country where the Cloudflare user resides?
I appreciate that these decisions can seem easy, but broadly do you want a private company deciding what can be on the internet, or do you want that decision made by a judge with due process?
That's completely different really. They just stopped proxying their traffic. Daily Stormer could continue on, assuming they pay enough to handle the traffic.
Turning off your domain name is a different story. You are sunk until you can regain control of it.
1) We can't remove content we don't host. Only the host can remove that content.
2) If you have located malicious content please do tell us about it -- cloudflare.com/abuse -- and once we confirm your report we can place a warning interstitial in front of that content and notify the host. The interstitial protects users in the interim while the host takes action to actually remove the content they are hosting.
First, anyone with the tiniest modicum of common sense can tell that these pretend Flash sites are absolutely not in the slightest way legitimate content.
Second, providing services in any way, shape or form is, in fact, hosting. Providing DNS? It's hosting. Providing a cached version of the site? Hosting.
So if they want to be in the business of pretending to be not-hosting, then they have to stop providing services that without which web sites would cease to function. Are they now going to claim that they're not providing meaningful services to domains registered through them, and therefore they should not be responsible for people who are doing illegal things?
Probably.