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".
no subject
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".