I find it utterly bizarre that CloudFlare considers itself some paragon of free speech whilst they have been caught red handed arbitrarily shutting peoples domain names down in their registrar service, even going so far as to prevent people from transfering their domains to other registers and accelerating domain expiry dates. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31576353
There's a difference in that the termination procedure this thread and the one its derived from talks about is about fraud, which is defined by law and prosecuted, rather than an opinion. When you learn about fraudsters using your service you can either GTFO as soon as possible or get involved with the police unless you want to risk criminal liability for being complicit.
Make whatever Kiwifarms does illegal and Cloudflare will probably drop them through their magical detection algorithms alone.
Terminating service to someone suspected of fraud is one thing. This is normal.
Preventing someone from transferring their domain to another registrar + accelerating it's expiration/cancellation date + stonewalling appeals is another thing entirely. That is going above and beyond. Domain cancellation is absolutely relevant to the conversation on free speech.
The way I see it, transferring a domain is still a business transaction. The ownership situation of domains are weird and complicated because of the intermediate registrars that are necessary for delegation reasons.
The only way I can think of to stop and drop fraudulent customers is to give them a time window to counter the claims and then drop the domain the second that window expires. Helping the customer move registrars after they've been caught is not a great look.
Preferably you'd have a human verify the situation before marking a domain as fraudulent but the automated nature of digital fraud can make this untenable and people would be more pissed off if Cloudflare wouldn't do something about the fraud they're able to identify automatically.
The procedures themselves are what I'm fine with butI have trouble with the lack of support American tech giants will give you once an automated system flags your account. They stop answering the phone, stop taking emails, and will do nothing until your appeal date expires, knowing that you don't have the resources to sue them.
Stripe and Cloudflare are commonly mentioned here for their lacking support and transparency once an account gets flagged (though relatively often the Stripe people get flagged for good reason, but still) because this place is the only way people can get support. These companies treat you like they treat the rest of the web, as a threat needed to be screened and monitored, blocked at the earliest sign of caution.
I hope people learn to not trust these huge cloud providers with tiny or unwilling support staff instead of ignoring their better judgement and posting here once they get blocked. We're all perpetuating a system of failure because we want the cheap speediness of fully automated systems and accept the risk of random bans. You can get a domain and a server provisioned in minutes or even seconds at the risk of losing your business down the line and because this rarely ever happens to innocent people we pretend to think it's fine.
Perhaps my perspective on this is a little skewed because HN is a place where many people dream of setting up a company to do the exact same thing, calling it "disrupting the market" and making bank rather than setting up a sustainable business with customer service at the forefront.
