That’s an interesting opinion. What about being publicly traded makes you think they’ll me more incentivized to censor?
Facebook’s performance suggests that playing fast and loose is preferable
Facebook’s performance suggests that playing fast and loose is preferable
As a publicly traded company the company is now actually accountable (rather than just in his head) to a slice of public opinion and to keep the brand as profitable as possible. That means not providing services for anything controversial.
Are you referring to The Daily Stormer and 8chan?
You don't often see private businesses making decisions like this on the front page of the new york times, but this one is a hot topic. They have no social, moral, or ethical obligation to serve these customers, and one's disagreement with that does not mean we should be forcing individuals to cater to everyone.
A company as large and important as Cloudflare disconnecting a client for moral or public outrage reasons is a big story and they should be watched with a careful eye even if you agree with the outcome.
"Activities of our paying and free customers or the content of their websites or other Internet properties, as well as our response to those activities, could cause us to experience significant adverse political, business, and reputational consequences with customers, employees, suppliers, government entities, and others."
8chan jumped ship to BitMitigate when CloudFlare dropped them, and then BitMitigate dumped them when they had their backbone link yanked out from under them.
Neither site broke any US laws, but they were both controversial.
In the personal/SMB spaces, you're right. Of course, enterprise remains their cash cow, where they compete with the big boys (akamai, incapsula, etc.).
> Neither site broke any US laws, but they were both controversial.
This is basically why so many are bothered by CloudFlare's decision. Who decides what's controversial? We've seen many examples in the past of normal views being "controversial".
CloudFlare, in this case.
Yes, but cloudflare is not denying a job to any of those people. Not to mention there are certainly threats of violence on those sites, which are technically illegal. That's grounds enough to take the site down.
I argued above that cloudflare's actions were concerning, but at the end of the day, it's cloudflare's network. Do you really want the state compelling by force a firm to carry the traffic of any one? I don't, and find it the only option more concerning than a firm arbitrarily refusing to do business.
I personally dislike the actions of cloudflare in this case, and am allowed to criticize them. However, I don't think it makes sense to have the state enforce my criticism via compulsion.