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Comment by jlawson | Hacker News Reader

Serious question - Are they serious about being evenhanded? Or did they just handpick a list of organizations with the same politics as them to serve as cover?

I guess this should be easy to tell. Are any of their partner organizations doing work to protect 2nd amendment rights, or supporting pro-life causes? I couldn't tell.

From my priors my first guess would be that this is a left-activist effort masquerading as a universal protection. But I'd be pleasantly surprised to discover that they're serious.

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We worked hard to try and get conservative and libertarian organizations as partners including the CATO Institute and the Heritage Foundation. They originally objected because they couldn't understand what was in it for us (Cloudflare). I think over time we've proved that we're serious about the Project and the idea of having global, diverse partners with different perspectives.

If there are potential partner organizations that you think represent a point of view, whether politically or geographically, that the current parters do not, I would encourage you to have them apply: https://www.cloudflare.com/galileo

> They originally objected because they couldn't understand what was in it for us (Cloudflare).

This is hilariously libertarian.

If nothing else it's advertising. "We have the capability to regularly defend against attacks from state-level actors."

> CATO Institute and the Heritage Foundation

Why aren't they mentioned on this blog post or the Galileo page?

I think it looks pretty good; and in this case it's an inclusive effort: including more organizations doesn't harm anyone (well, except CloudFlare themselves). They have excluded some more sleazy organizations which tend to show up in lists like this, so I think they are paying attention to that.

I guess we'll see, if SAF or some organization similarly alien to Californian progressives, comes under attack, whether it is as you would hope.

I don't know if they are even-handed or not, but is there a reason they need to be?

No there isn't, but the article is somewhat worded like they are. And as a US company at least if they were to protect someone like manning or Snowden they'd probably run into problems anyways.

It’s not universal, dude. There are some 600 orgs on the list. I don’t see why it’s important to offer this to some antivaxxer as much as a citizen news source in Russia.

> We also worried that it was dangerous for an infrastructure provider like Cloudflare to start making decisions about what content was "good." Doing so inherently would imply that we were in a position to make decisions about what content was "bad." While moderating content and curating communities is appropriate for some more visible platforms, the deeper you go into Internet infrastructure, the less transparent, accountable, and consistent those decisions inherently become.

That is, the position of a CDN is such that picking the winners and losers is more risky than not doing so.

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