I wonder if there are people out there who don't want internet infrastructure to be run by the government specifically because the government would protect freedom of speech "too much".
This is a bad analogy. Cloudflare is not inspecting individual packets for hate speech. They are refusing to do business with an organization that negatively affects their brand (The Daily Stormer). They should have the right to make that choice as a private entity.
"They should have the right to make that choice as a private entity."
No they should not.
And the analogy works: if you're getting filtered on the basis of your content - at the packet level or not - then it's fundamentally against Net Neutrality.
Wait until the PR team at Verizon decides they don't want to publish your content because you're too vocal about BLM. Or, they will only support you if you do support BLM, or something rubbish. And now your VPN, your server host, caching technology provider, Telco, wireless provider, Visa/Amex, Video-conf provider - it's completely absurd.
FedEx won't ship 'PlanB' because it's a 'controversial' medicine? But they will in 3 states?
USPS will ship condoms everywhere but not in Utah where the local Union forbids it?
Alaska Big Oil gets their local VPN owners to ban Greentech related sites?
Trump's buddies on the Board of AT&T get them to threaten anyone hosting 'fake news' about Trump?
California Teachers Union Pension Fund presses Cloudflare to ban all hosting of anything related to law enforcement?
And FYI nobody is acting 'morally' - they're scared executives just trying to do whatever to hush people up and continue making money - a system which hands arbitrary power to arbitrary groups. This is not what anyone wants.
For services that are inherently 'content neutral' - the content should not be allowed to be a basis of discrimination.
For Social Media it's different, as there is an inherent association between the platform and it's users, but not for Cloudflare, or AWS or Verizon, Gmail for example.
There is no end to the insanity otherwise; we need basic, smart and clear regulation.
Edit: I should add 'and that's just the US'. Imagine when a very vocal, organised group wants to ban Arabs living in what is commonly referred to as 'Palestine' from using the term 'Palestine'. Or Serbian authorities from hosting content using the term 'Kosovo' in any way that reflects its supposed 'autonomy'. Or Greek companies ganging up on Macedonia's usage of the term 'Macedonia'. Or Greens in Germany from banning pro-Nuclear energy content. There are at least a handful of Tweeters who would want those things. It gets infinitely messy, very quickly.
There is clear regulation in many countries: nazi speech gets you thrown in jail, the rest is mostly fine. See njmerious european countries like Germany that aren't some dystopia hellscape. That reflects a lot of what happens voluntarily today anyway, but it can't of course be formalized into regulatory law in the USA, because such regulation is restricted by the first amendment.
Your panic is unwarranted anyways, because many of those countries do allow free speech restrictions, yet no runaway crazy banning has happened yet. Its just a fictional slippery slope made up to protect hate speech. Words don't protect against tyrany anyways; actually fighting against tyranny does.
"Its just a fictional slippery slope made up to protect hate speech"
Ah, and there is the ugly, authoritarian, Stalinist argument right there.
"We only ban, denounce, destroy those who are GUILTY of Hate Crimes, so how could you have any worry about that?"
People are banned all day long on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Stripe, comments sections etc. for any and all sorts of made up reasons that have nothing to do with hate speech. And FYI you can say things that are essentially hate speech, but in a political context may not be, so it's fine i.e. "White People Are a Disease" is a common thing on Twitter. No problems there apparently.
And speaking as a former German resident, they have some real Nazis there, none of this kind of 'made up suff' like in the US.
This is a problem that needs to be addressed.
'Freedom of Expression' is the #1 Amendment to the US Constitution and the #1 thing in the relatively new Canadian constitution (#11 in EU) for a very good reason: it took thousands of years for 'every day people' to be able to speak their minds without being shot.
We can't leave this issue up to corporate CEO's, mostly trying to read the Twitter tea leaves.
I agree completely. I think democratizing speech so that it cannot be controlled by any source of power, government or financial, does have real importance. But its not the most important right, compared to life or wellbeing: instead, its important because it supports what's actually important.
But I have a message of good news: it turns out speech can be lightly restricted while leading to less authoritarianism or cronyism, as can be seen from numerous examples, by simply restricting speech in a way that is kept controlled by the specific people who are subject to it.
I don't have a lot of faith that we will resolve this, but the 'Net Neutrality' vs. 'Ban Someone I Don't Like' hypocrisy is dizzying.
The positions are ideological and naive - they are obviously contradictory - it's only that when they are framed in certain ways, often 'straw-man-ish', do people think they have clarity on them.
For example, it's easy to understand why we don't want Verizon charging customers different prices based on the nature of the content. It's easy for us to want to 'ban Nazis' from Reddit. But both of those are unrealistic ideals (i.e. straw men) because neither contemplate the broader application. It's a very slippery slope.
It's not a big deal that Nazis get banned from somewhere, and maybe it's not a big deal that Verizon wants to design services such that your profitable business costs 2x on their network - but those bounds expand very rapidly.
On the front pages of CNN and Fox right now we have a completely ridiculous war over 'Goya' canned foods because of some arbitrary comments the founder made about Trump.
This issue is only going to get much worse and more complicated over time.
We have basically no choice but to define what kinds of businesses can use what thresholds, and try to infer what those thresholds are.
> This issue is only going to get much worse and more complicated over time.
Slippery slope is a fallacy. Humans aren't required to follow the precedent of previous decisions like SCOTUS justices are. People eventually see the problems with previous choices once the consequences hit a tipping point.
We are having multiple moral panics right now. They will pass.
People will eventually get more tolerant of others making mistakes on social media; it will accelerate once more of us know someone who directly loses their job/status/etc to a moral panic. Also, there are examples of people who were targeted by moral panic mobs (eg. Colin Kaepernick) who survived the outrage and overcame it.
Once enough people get {"cancelled", fired, boycotted, excommunicated, etc}, these calls carry less and less effect over time and social media mobs lose their power.
> On the front pages of CNN and Fox right now we have a completely ridiculous war over 'Goya' canned foods because of some arbitrary comments the founder made about Trump.
Those are bad gauges of anything except outrage-for-clicks. Those two webpages rile up their core viewership to generate eyeballs and collect web-ad revenue. Trump only got to the front of the 2016 Republican primary because the rest of the field was boring and he riled up moral panics and owned most of the news cycles since.
> but those bounds expand very rapidly
Not always. And this ignores the observable fact that there is almost always a regression to the mean. There are social frictions which prevent these moral panics from burning too long.
The 'slope' has been 'slipping' for at least 10 years, and here is no indication that it's going to let up.
The opposite of 'fallacy' - it's literally happening all around you:
1) We now have major corporate support for 'social claims' with brands backing (and cashing in) on celebrities for their politics, not their skill at 'whatever', and supporting some causes surrounding a lot of public disruption. These have led to some groups trying to 'ban' others.
2) The attempted influencing of electoral outcomes via 'bad information' from outside agents, agitators, along with a plethora of information - with no guidance other than the whims of CEOs. There's all sorts of 'banning' on FB and YouTube and it's all pretty grey, often it can have major consequences.
3) CEO's brought to congressional hearings for these issues -
this is a sign that 'ban' culture is now a top concern.
4) Weekly national 'pop culture wars' over which brand has transgressed which group, promoted widely in the press, resulting in calls for bans of some products or services.
5) 'Social concern' as the primary legitimacy for populism, even among those who are supposed to be popular for their acting, music, or athletics. In the last 10 years - ever 'celeb' has embarked upon a 'personal branding campaign' to imbue themselves with moral authority. There was always a little bit of this - but now it's 'the thing'. Go and have a look at social media, try 'Kristen Bell'. Every few posts are about some kind of moral concern. Otherwise: they could get the ban. A host of globally respected individuals had to sign an piece in Harper's. This is basically 'shocking' to anyone of a certain age, because intellectuals and their ilk used to be the one's fighting for freedom of expression against the authorities - now, 'ban' culture has infiltrated their organisations and become a populist issue.
6) There are disruptions and protests around what would be normal, common, mundane events: 'The Joker' review by the Daily Beast was entitled: "Everything About the Joker was Absolutely Infuriating". The 'infuriating' parts had nothing to do with the film, but rather the supposed politics of the film. The DB and others wanted the film to not be released is it were. There are weekly arguments over who can play who in film, supposed issues of representation, wars over the composition of selection committees - often resulting in the 'cancelling' of individuals.
Twitter and social media have created the ability for agitators to move giant waves of people in an emotional, populist direction, resulting in quite a lot of effort to ban, cancel, disassociate.
It's far worse than ever before, and it's going to be worse before it gets better.
I see no pathway for it 'getting better' anytime soon, because the pathways to outrage have formed, hardened and are now part of our culture.
Individually - yes - most of us are getting sick of it - but that won't change the fact of the activity in the news, on Twitter, and journalists 'calling for the resignation' of so and so for this and that with the basic moral impetus of 'someone on Twitter said it, therefore, that's how America feels'.
CloudFlare, Facebook - your startup - does not want to deal with this, there needs to be some kind of collective clarity.
1, partly 5) Who are you to be the arbiter of what is 'supposed' to make people popular? It doesn't work that way. Can you read the mind of Kristen Bell and know she acts out of fear?
2, 3) No guidance other than the whims of CEOs... oh and congress. How does that add up?
4) On a slippery slope from yellow journalism to...
I'm sorry for the low-effort post, but something like this is quite tricky to respond to. Much like your view of the thing you're railing against, any legit points you may have drown in a sea of outrage completely lacking perspective and full of non sequiturs.
Cloudflare was purely acting out of market based fear, there wasn't a hint of moral impetus. Literally he said: "I don't want people saying they won't work with us" - which is giving into the mob.
Where is the ACLU on this?
We were all screaming for Net Neutrality just a couple years ago.
It's up to communities and governments to make decisions on content, it would actually help if the government made it illegal for CloudFlare to refuse service to someone so long as they were within certain guidelines, thereby absolving businesses of this issue.
Imagine literally the marketing and PR teams of Verizon, Facebook, Cloudflare, AWS, Google, your rando VPN provider, getting to decide if they 'think they might not like you' or not, it's just too much.
For marketplaces like AppStore, it's fine. But for other services, this is not going to work. It's not the job of your Telco or Garbage Pickup do decide if your public statements are cool/uncool enough for their Instagram.
> Cloudflare was purely acting out of market based fear, there wasn't a hint of moral impetus.
IIRC, the reason DailyStormer pissed off CloudFlare is because the users claimed (lied) about CloudFlare was somehow participating / sponsoring the site/activities. Sports teams have non-disparagement clauses; I don't see this as much different.
The only thing I'm not clear about is if it was just a rando user on DS that said the thing or some moderator/admin who can reasonably be said to represent the organization that runs the site.
Also, Macy's and Starbucks are allowed to deny their business to individuals at their discretion (subject to Equal Rights and Americans with Disabilities laws). Last I checked, being a Nazi is not a protected status (perhaps I'm wrong).
> We were all screaming for Net Neutrality just a couple years ago.
Different concept. This is about who a vendor chooses to allow as a customer. Common Carrier status is perhaps a closer comparison, but I think AT&T is allowed to drop a customer if they violate the AT&T ToS / contract.
Also, the CEO of CloudFlare went out of his way to publicize that this was a problem for the health of the internet and to start a conversation. Society didn't walk away from CloudFlare (eg. "vote with your feet/wallet") and Congress didn't choose to create any laws.
Citation for the CloudFlare / DailyStormer incident:
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
This is more about enforcing ToS and maintaining reputation than "an internet infrastructure company cancels DailyStormer because of their ideology".
The complicating factor is that CloudFlare was not the only internet infra company to drop them. DS were rapidly dropped or denied accounts from other companies during this news cycle, so they were effectively kept offline because none of the large infra companies they approached wanted to deal with the issue in a "free speech over all other concerns" kind of way.
> Common Carrier status is perhaps a closer comparison, but I think AT&T is allowed to drop a customer if they violate the AT&T ToS / contract.
That would make net neutrality meaningless, surely. Just put something in the ToS that says you agree not to actually use your internet service.
> Also, the CEO of CloudFlare went out of his way to publicize that this was a problem for the health of the internet and to start a conversation. Society didn't walk away from CloudFlare (eg. "vote with your feet/wallet") and Congress didn't choose to create any laws.
Which is exactly the problem. America has given up on free speech, and CloudFlare was a prime mover in that shift.
When they're speaking for themselves? Sure. When they're acting as a common carrier? No. It's too bad regulation hasn't kept up with the realities of how important the Internet is.
> Society didn't walk away from CloudFlare (eg. "vote with your feet/wallet") and Congress didn't choose to create any laws.
Neither of those things mean you did the right thing. It’s really easy to pick on a widely unpopular minority group and not get laws passed against you or lose a noticeable amount of customers.
> Neither of those things mean you did the right thing.
I find it hard to believe the right thing would involve either CloudFlare tolerating libel (my interpretation) about them by a customer or that we should always tolerate an unmitigated amount of free speech (at least the obviously political/religious speech originally envisioned) no matter the cost to {business, society, decency, morals, etc}.
What is "the right thing" to you in this situation?
