Hacker News Reader

Comment by bronzeage | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare lost in the long run. Especially as a host of DDoS protections, which many websites with significant opposition and threats require. Next time a controversial site decides to find itself DDoS protection, I hope it will think twice before going to cloudflare. Because how will you tell if that when the next internet shitstorm comes and focus on your website, cloudflare will stand there for you. Internet is all about freedom of speech. Every one will have his stage, with or without your help. I would've somewhat tolerated cloudflare if they had never hosted TDS in the first place and just disagreed to do that. But this is just a disgusting populist U turn, led by the current internet trend.

I would write a disclaimer about how I think TDS is horrible, but I honestly have never opened that website once, and I feel like the need to apologize for defending freedom of speech is absurd.

View on HN

Some freedoms have costs.

The right to free speech comes with the cost of a minority of people using it to say and promote hateful, hurtful, even evil things.

The right to bear arms comes with the cost of a minority using them to murder and commit suicide.

So on and so forth with lots of other freedoms we enjoy (driving, flying drones, 3d printers, etc).

It seems like it is trendy now to trade freedoms in order to reduce those costs I've listed. It's a shame though, because it's very difficult to go the other direction and gain more freedom in exchange for increased costs.

I read up on this a little yesterday. What do you think about this site getting dropped from GoDaddy, then Google for T.O.S. violations?

I could just be ill informed, but it seemed like Cloudflare could have simply just done the exact same thing quietly. But instead they at first did nothing, after some criticism in the press did the CEO wake up in a bad mood to remove their protection. His blog and email read almost noble, then I caught up on the days prior and it made me think much less of them as a company, him as a leader.

Feels like you as a company should be able to do business with whoever you want, and will face judgment for it in the public eye, I have no issue with that. I have no idea where I'm going with this so I will stop now.

> What do you think about this site getting dropped from GoDaddy, then Google for T.O.S. violations?

I think it's a little disturbing. On the one hand, I vehemently disagree with TDS and what they are saying. On the other, what if the political tide turns against my religion and my church's website is knocked off the web for being "anti-LGBT"?

I personally would prefer if domain registrars remained politically neutral. I'm hoping this is just an extreme case and that they won't do it on a wide-scale in the future.

> what if the political tide turns against my religion and my church's website is knocked off the web for being "anti-LGBT"?

Yes, what then? Shall we solve that problem when we have it?

Because you can fantasize and theorize until the cows come home about how your religion and your church will be knocked off the web but in the meantime that never happened and it very likely never will and if and when it does you will find a lot of voices sympathetic to your cause, including mine.

Or are we somehow beyond being able to evaluate things on merit?

> I'm hoping this is just an extreme case and that they won't do it on a wide-scale in the future.

Yes, it is an extreme case. And no, it most likely - you can't deal in absolutes - won't be done on a wide scale in the future.

So the message is that we are all okay silencing TDS in this case because they're pretty bad. I'm not okay with that. It is too intellectually dishonest for my taste (among other things).

Slippery slopes are alive and well, particularly in this domain. Go back to 2006 or so and tell them that in a decade, bakeries would be getting sued for not catering gay weddings.

It is entirely right and proper to consider the likely future implications of an act before you decide it's a good idea. Even if it feels really good to stick it to $OUTGROUP just this one time.

> Go back to 2006 or so and tell them that in a decade, bakeries would be getting sued for not catering gay weddings.

Why would I do that? I'm fine with bakeries getting sued for not catering gay weddings, that's one of the advantages of living in a normal society: the ability to petition the courts to seek redress.

> Go back to 2006 or so and tell them that in a decade, bakeries would be getting sued for not catering gay weddings.

Public accommodation laws for sexual orientation were passed in some states before then, and it's a fairly trivial and obvious application of those laws.

Why should they. They are private entities ruled primarily by the question what fosters shareholder value.

So I expect nothing less then pure self-interest. I would never expect freedom of speech as it isn't guaranteed like against a state actor.

AFAIK the TOS violations were because of TDS actively stalking and harassing people, not because they're terrible people. I may be wrong though, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Don't be the person that thinks "let's ban Nazis" is going to lead to everything in the world turning into Orwell's 1984.

You just don't have enough information about society to make your slippery-slope argument valid.

The world is a lot more complicated than what your simplistic slippery-slope model predicts. Deal with the problem at hand, not some distant theoretical problem based on your simplistic models of life.

You can ban Nazi expression now, and everything will be fine, because society has a lot of safeguards to prevent other bad things from happening.

Don't be simple.

Don't be the person that thinks the world will turn into Orwell's 1984 in a blink-of-an-eye, it happens gradually, bit by bit over time.

Would you like me to list all the freedoms we've already lost? Or are you able to sufficiently navel-gaze and ignore them b/c of your simplistic view of how slippery-slopes work?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com