- Cloudflare decides that they do not want to provide this service anymore so they terminate it.
The specifics of how exactly they terminated this service are really unsubstantial to the question of censorship. You might be right for kiwifarm to have a case here,
They did not terminate them for "being" a particular way, they terminated them for "doing" a particular thing. In other words, they were not judged for the color if their skin, but for the content of their character.
If anything, cloudflare should do this more often - they protect way too many people and gargabe contentewho do not and which does not deserve this kind of protection.
If people want to be an asshole on the internet - or in real life - that is their perogative, but they cannot reasonable expect to have the enthusiatic support of society in doing so.
The way you are wrong comes up here:
"Surely, we will see many more websites go down"
These sites all chose to use cloudflare - not the other way around. cloudflare has zero control over these sites. If cloudflare stops to provide them with their service, they can just move somewhere else. cloudflare is not the internet, they just take themselves way to seriously. What they have built is not unique, it is just very large. They are not preventing kiwifarm from expressing themselves in any way shape or form. If kiwifarm wants DDOS protection, they can find a different DDOS protection service, and if they find out they are so despised that noone will take them, then they can make their own DDOS protection service. They aren't owed a platform for their shitty views. Just like I am not owed one for my arguably much less shitty views.
I would go as far as saying that beyond the allocation of IP address space and to a certain extent domain names - nobody is owed anything to participate on the internet. These are the building blocks. Go build things with them,
And if you have built them and someone ask you to share these things you have built, but then decides to use them to do shitty things, just tell them
"Hey this doesn't work for me, if you wanna say these things, please do so from your own space."
- Cloudflare provides a service
- some "unsavory" people buy this service
- Cloudflare decides that they do not want to provide this service anymore so they terminate it.
The specifics of how exactly they terminated this service are really unsubstantial to the question of censorship. You might be right for kiwifarm to have a case here,
They did not terminate them for "being" a particular way, they terminated them for "doing" a particular thing. In other words, they were not judged for the color if their skin, but for the content of their character.
If anything, cloudflare should do this more often - they protect way too many people and gargabe contentewho do not and which does not deserve this kind of protection.
If people want to be an asshole on the internet - or in real life - that is their perogative, but they cannot reasonable expect to have the enthusiatic support of society in doing so.
The way you are wrong comes up here:
These sites all chose to use cloudflare - not the other way around. cloudflare has zero control over these sites. If cloudflare stops to provide them with their service, they can just move somewhere else. cloudflare is not the internet, they just take themselves way to seriously. What they have built is not unique, it is just very large. They are not preventing kiwifarm from expressing themselves in any way shape or form. If kiwifarm wants DDOS protection, they can find a different DDOS protection service, and if they find out they are so despised that noone will take them, then they can make their own DDOS protection service. They aren't owed a platform for their shitty views. Just like I am not owed one for my arguably much less shitty views.I would go as far as saying that beyond the allocation of IP address space and to a certain extent domain names - nobody is owed anything to participate on the internet. These are the building blocks. Go build things with them,
And if you have built them and someone ask you to share these things you have built, but then decides to use them to do shitty things, just tell them
"Hey this doesn't work for me, if you wanna say these things, please do so from your own space."
That is not censorship.