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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal.

Unless you have an ironclad way to verify the identity of every poster, you'll get a bunch of illegal stuff anyway. And if you're a "utility", then who is responsible for removing that from your service?

What you're really suggesting is "common carrier", but the difference is most common carriers carry the content in a point to point way, not publicly (FedEx, UPS, your telephone provider). For the common carriers that do have public broadcast (radio, TV, cable) they either have to moderate all their content and are responsible for it (TV, radio) or they have to provide an unmoderated but public access section where they know exactly who the content provider is (cable TV, who gets to choose which channels to carry as long as they have a public access channel).

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>What you're really suggesting is "common carrier", but the difference is most common carriers carry the content in a point to point way, not publicly

Wouldn't all payment processors and Cloudflare qualify for this in certain ways?

Payment processors have never been classed as even kind of a common carrier. Pretty much the moment you deal with money the government will more or less be your "partner".

Cloudflare notably has not been legally forced to take the positions it has. You can be a common carrier as much as you want

Regarding the money sensitivity issue, I do understand KYC, etc. However, once they determine that you are not doing anything illegal, they are simply moving money from one person to another and in that respect that are a "kind" of common carrier. Porn is not illegal. So they are specifically stepping in and making a socially acceptable (to them) judgement call to stop something that is perfectly legal when they should be just making sure you are not a terrorist or drug-dealer and minding their own business.

>Cloudflare notably has not been legally forced to take the positions it has.

True they flip-flop depending on how the winds of Twitter are blowing, but they are quickly positioning themselves in such a way that someone could earnestly claim there is not reasonable alternative and that they are "required" to run a business. Then what?

That's the part people forget about "utilities" and "carriers". The reason they were indemnified, is precisely because they know the exact identities, (and even locations), of all of their users. The cops can handle things themselves, they just ask the "utility" or "carrier" who X is? And who is X connected, (or even connecting), to.

We have to think up an entirely different model for the newer technologies we are using.

This is not entirely true for at least the postal service - someone can address a bomb or drugs with some stamps and a fake sender address quite easily. Only the recipient address is known, but again people sometimes have mail sent to a known empty house to pick up.

This is very important to not forget. We might also note, though, that that same indemnification exists in a context where e.g. the postal service is under no obligation to keep people from sending things in code to each other, even if police would prefer all communications to be in cleartext.

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