Potential downtime this weekend (2 Sept - 5 Sept)

[denise]

Beginning this weekend (2 Sept - 5 Sept), users may experience short periods of site slowdowns or difficulty accessing the site. If you do have access issues, they shouldn't last long for you in particular, but the length of time where access issues are possible should last for about a week or so. We wanted to warn you in advance. You may not notice anything, or the site may be down, slow, or unreachable for you for brief periods. The exact length of downtime, and the total potential downtime window, will depend on your internet provider's settings.

This downtime is necessary to move our domain nameservice, our content delivery network (CDN) services, and our denial-of-service protection services away from Cloudflare, our current provider of those services. We've been discussing migrating away from Cloudflare recently due to their refusal to deny services to sites that endanger people's offline security and incite and target people for offline harassment and physical violence. That conversation became more urgent yesterday when, in a blog post about the campaign to encourage Cloudflare to behave more responsibly regarding the types of sites they enable to remain on the internet, Cloudflare's CEO revealed that they regret past enforcement actions where they closed the accounts of sites containing child sexual abuse material and sites that advocate for white supremacist terrorism.

We do not believe we can ethically continue to retain the services of a company that could write that blog post. As those of you who've been with us for a while know, our guiding principles involve supporting our users' expression to the maximum extent possible, and we reaffirm our commitment to protecting as much of your content that's unpopular but legal under US law as we can. However, we also believe it's more vital, not less, for a company with such free-speech maximalist views to have clear, concrete, and well-enforced policies regarding content that does cross their lines, including refusing to provide services to sites that actively incite and manufacture threats to people's physical safety, contain child sex abuse material, or advocate or instruct people how to conduct terrorism. That Cloudflare refuses to refuse services to those types of sites, and has expressed regret about the instances in the past where they have refused services to those types of sites, means we feel we can no longer ethically retain their services.

Things may be slightly bumpy for a bit as we make the transition and work to find the best replacements for the services we've been relying on Cloudflare to provide. We're very sorry for any slowdowns or downtime that may happen over the next week and a half or so, and we hope you'll bear with us as we make the move.

[EDIT: Because there are many of you and one of me, please check the comments before replying to see whether your issue has been addressed! Also, in accordance with the official DW community comment guidelines, please refrain from personal attacks, insults, slurs, generalizations about a group of people due to race/nationality/religion, and comments that are posted only to mock other commenters: all of those will be screened.]

[EDIT 7:12pm EDT: Because the temperature of many comments is frustratingly high, people don't seem to be reading previous replies before commenting as requested, and some people are just spoiling for a fight, I'm screening all comments to this entry by default while I can't be directly in front of the computer for the remainder of the day. We'll unscreen comments intermittently for the rest of the night as we have time, and I'll systematically unscreen all good-faith comments that don't contain personal attacks, insults, slurs, generalizations about a group of people due to race/nationality/religion, and comments that are posted only to mock other commenters when I return.]

[Edit 9/2 6:05pm EDT: having left comment screening on overnight, and seeing the percentage of abusive, bad-faith, or detached-from-reality comments, comment screening will remain on for this entry indefinitely. I'll keep an eye on it for another day or two and unscreen what needs to be unscreened, but probably not longer after that.]

Comments

[denise]

Ha, I promise, I retype every comment from scratch! I've just been soapboxing about these issues for long enough (20+ years now) that I tend to fall into the same phrasing when I'm working quickly.

I take your point about infrastructure vs hosting site, but I don't think it deserves as much weight as you're giving it. Whether we like it or not, the FCC has declined to treat even internet service providers as common carriers, and Cloudflare is one layer up from even that -- and even a common carrier such as the phone company can refuse service if the client is abusing their network or violating laws. The "as long as the content isn't illegal" sounds like it should be a useful litmus test, but it really isn't, for several reasons: one, the point CF makes in that blog post of laws differing from country to country such that a request to deny service on legal grounds can be perfectly legal coming from an oppressive regime even when the content is both legal in the provider's country and content that the provider doesn't believe should be taken down, and two, even if you're only dealing with a single country's laws, the length of time it takes for specific content to be adjudicated via court as "illegal" is impractical to rely on when the content is causing verifiable, offline harm right this instant. (And very, very few categories of content is immediately and conclusively identifiable as prima facie illegal under US law, especially to a layperson who hasn't trained as a lawyer and then spent 20-30 years trying cases. Even those people disagree about the legality of things; if you ask five lawyers 'is this illegal', you'll get 14 opinions.) So even if you're relying on that rubric, you either have to wait 5 years for a case to be fully adjudicated, or you have to rely on your interpretations of what's legal and what's not -- and that brings us back to a site's individual judgement.

And I mean, just going by US law, every time I've visited KF, I've seen content that, in my professional opinion, would likely be adjudicated illegal in at least one US state or federal court if brought before it, including the presence of CSAM on the site. Even a provider that has a stated policy of "only remove content that's likely illegal" should be removing KF. Cloudflare's policy isn't "only remove content that's likely illegal", it's "remove content that's likely illegal unless we don't think it should be removed", which is even worse.

Like I've said in other replies, these are hard questions -- I've devoted my entire career to wrestling with them. Cloudflare isn't engaging in them in any meaningful fashion. It's their right to refuse to do so and I would object to any governmental attempts to force them to change their policies in any way, but the line for "do we want to do business with them if they continue to refuse to do this thing" is a lot further back than "do we think the government should force them to do this thing".

[eiffel_71]

Congrats on doing the right thing. Hope all goes well. *x*

[lethe1]

I find it incredible that DW users would challenge your stance on this!

[dcltdw]

Thank you for doing this, and kudos to you for having the ethical fortitude to do so.

[andrusi]

...what do you think "human trafficking" means?

[denise]

1) We do not allow people to make white supremacist arguments in dw-news comments. We do not allow people to defend white supremacist terrorism in dw-news comments. That content is not welcome here, and both the severity of the inappropriateness of the comments and the fact you've been cautioned about the conduct policies in dw-news comments once before means that you have been banned from further commenting in this community.

2) You appear to disagree with the entirety of how we express and uphold our values and guiding principles. While you are welcome to do so and continue to use the site, you will likely be happier on a site that more closely matches your ideology, as we will not change those values and guiding principles because you disagree with them. I wish you luck in finding a site that is more closely aligned with your ideology.

[lassarina]

Thank you for continuing to be the site that I am delighted to call my Internet home.

[denise]

Personal attacks are not appropriate in dw-news comments; please refrain from making them.

[denise]

In the US, the definition is set forth in Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969): "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".

[china_shop]

Thank you! ♥

[borgmama1of5]

Thank you for acting in accordance with your ethical beliefs!

[dhampyresa]

Thank you for all you do.

[shadysided]

Thank you for this update, and for your patience and level heads in these comments. 🙏

I hope the transition is smooth for you all!

[dianafortyseven]

Thank you so much for moving away from Cloudflare!! <3

[peaked]

Thank you. ♥ I hope the transition goes smoothly!

[kore]

This is a great comment, and it really tickles me that there's a Jessica Jones icon on it. (Jessica would not put up with that shit.)

[denise]

I went into an explanation of why a policy that starts and ends with "is this content illegal" is inadequate here, and to be clear, the thing that tipped us over into moving away from Cloudflare isn't just "refusing to refuse service to KiwiFarms": I do think that Cloudflare should refuse service to them, but I can envision the existence of a thoughtful, well-reasoned, internally consistent content policy that would mean Cloudflare kept providing services to KF. (I would disagree with that policy, and it would probably have still caused us to switch providers, but it would be possible to craft it.) The reason yesterday's blog post tipped us over into "end our relationship with Cloudflare" is because it's clear they're falling back on the "is it illegal" question as the sole reason they will ever deny service for their DDoS protection services, and that policy is not thoughtful, well-reasoned, or internally consistent at all. Using legality as a sole benchmark raises more questions than it answers, and after 9 years of being in business and handling reports of abuse of their network, Cloudflare should definitely have been able to recognize that and pre-emptively explain at least a few of their answers to those questions.

These are messy issues, and we're going to be arguing about them for another few decades at the least; I've been doing this for 20 years and honestly, I've got more unanswered issues than I have solutions for overall policy. We've tried to make DW policy as concrete and bright-line as we can make it -- the ideal goal would be "if you pulled ten random users and put them down in front of a content report, then gave them a copy of the policy that applies, do they, knowing nothing but the policy, all arrive at the same conclusion" -- but even with all our collective experience in this space, we still run face-first into ambiguities in the policies from time to time. (We had an issue a few months ago where we debated for three days straight about whether one clause in one policy was conjunctive or disjunctive.) They're hard problems. The biggest issue we have with Cloudflare's blog post is that they believe the hard problems can be reduced to simple ones just by waving their hands, and that attitude is antithetical to thoughtful, reasoned policy decisions.

[assholic]

Heckity no she would not. Taking out Cloudflare one building block at a time. Bam bam.

[denise]

I know these are hot-button issues these days, and a lot of the public discussion is heated, partisan, and completely ignorant of the realities of actually running a service and wrestling with the extremely complex sorts of scenarios that arise. I'm always willing to explain the factors that go into our thinking! (We just ask people to participate in that discussion in good faith and without the use of slurs, personal attacks, or generalizations about entire groups of people, because those aren't conducive to a good-faith discussion -- that rule's been around since the start.) Reasonable people operating in good faith absolutely can come to different conclusions; the best we can do is explain our reasoning and let people make their own decisions from there.

[sutekinaj]

Thank you so much for the heads-up.

[alexseanchai]

Should you or anyone else want to read the post without giving them the traffic, Wayback Machine has it.

Wayback Machine has fifteen of it, actually, even though it was published yesterday. Guess a lot of people had the same idea.

[muccamukk]

Thanks for the heads up, for having such a well-thought-out policy, and for all your patience in comments. This kind of thing is why I love this site.

[denise]

Please do not make negative generalizations about groups of people, even as examples, in the comments to dw-news.

We have not, nor will we, ever promised that we won't remove content on the site. Every site that accepts user generated content needs to remove some of it, in order to get rid of spam, remove content that exposes us to legal liability, or remove content that causes offline harm. The restrictions we place are as minimal as we can make them, but they do exist.

That having been said: nothing about this change of service providers has changed or will change anything about our content policies. Our content policies remain the same as they have for fourteen years, and those policies are as permissive as we believe we can make them. For the most part, the policies are guided by US law, with a few additional prohibitions to prevent offline harm to people -- for instance, we don't allow people to post someone else's personally identifying information, financial details, credit card numbers, etc. That content isn't inherently illegal, but it causes offline harm, so we don't allow it. We do examine our policies and make small clarifications when we find examples of content that isn't easy to fit into "okay" or "not okay" under the existing policies, because people are very good at finding things that are right on the line and could go either way based on how you read it, but we do so with deliberation and caution. We're choosing to no longer do business with Cloudflare because we don't believe their policies are created with deliberation or with caution, and we believe the blog post they posted yesterday is an incoherent mess of a policy statement that indicates they haven't done much thinking about the questions at all.

Since you mention Russian state censorship, I will also state, for the record, that telling Roskom to go fuck themselves is one of my greatest joys as a site owner, and we do not and will not respond to any legal requests that come from any body other than a United States court after due legal process has been followed. We've never received any requests from the FSB, but if we did, I'd tell them the same thing I tell Roskom: we do not acknowledge they have any authority to request anything from us and we will not comply.

[sewn]

Thank you.

[paserbyp]

Got it and good to know that you guys don’t put all eggs in one basket.

Regarding options, indeed budget is a main constrain here.

Thank you for details and I hope transition to a new providers will be very, very smooth!