Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince hated cutting off service to the infamous neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer in August. And he's determined not to do it again.
"I'm almost a free-speech absolutist." Prince said at an event at the New America Foundation last Wednesday. But in a subsequent interview with Ars, Prince argued that in the case of the Daily Stormer, the company didn't have much choice.
Cloudflare runs a popular content delivery network that specializes in protecting clients from distributed denial-of-service attacks. The Daily Stormer published a post mocking a woman who was killed during the white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia in August. That had made a lot of people angry at the Daily Stormer, attracting massive attacks on the site.
The Stormer was a Cloudflare customer. Cloudflare had ample technical resources to battle DDOS attacks. The problem was that other Cloudflare customers started calling and threatening to cancel their service if Cloudflare didn't cut the Daily Stormer off.
"The pressure to take it down just kept building and building," Prince told Ars. "We thought that was the wrong policy. We reached out to various civil libertarian organizations and said we need some air cover here. People said 'we'd rather not stick our necks out on this issue.'"
So, Prince said, "we needed to change the conversation."
Why Cloudflare is cultivating free-speech allies
Prince's response was to cut Daily Stormer off while laying the groundwork to make sure he'd never have to make a decision like that again. In a remarkable company-wide email sent shortly after the decision, Prince described his own actions as "arbitrary" and "dangerous."
"I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet," Prince wrote in August. "It was a decision I could make because I'm the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company." He argued that "it's important that what we did today not set a precedent."
Prior to August, Cloudflare had consistently refused to police content published by its customers.
Last week, Prince made a swing through DC to help ensure that the Daily Stormer decision does not, in fact, set a precedent. He met with officials from the Federal Communications Commission and with researchers at the libertarian Cato Institute and the left-of-center New America Foundation—all in an effort to ensure that he'd have the political cover he needed to say no next time he came under pressure to take down controversial content.
The law is strongly on Cloudflare's side here. Internet infrastructure providers like Cloudflare have broad legal immunity for content created by their customers. But legal rights may not matter if Cloudflare comes under pressure from customers to take down content. And that's why Prince is working to cultivate a social consensus that infrastructure providers like Cloudflare should not be in the censorship business—no matter how offensive its customers' content might be.
Prince's visit came in the midst of the network neutrality debate. Cloudflare supports network neutrality—it even offers customers an option to display a pro-net-neutrality page to visitors—and Prince argues that people should think of Cloudflare as a neutral infrastructure provider like Comcast or Verizon.
In theory, Comcast could blacklist hate sites, preventing its broadband customers from accessing them. But nobody gets mad at Comcast for declining to do that. In fact, lots of people think it should be illegal for Comcast to block websites based on their content (and current FCC rules prohibit such blocking).
Prince isn't advocating FCC regulation of Cloudflare, but he argues that the same principle ought to apply to his company. In his view, it's not right for a largely invisible Web infrastructure company like Cloudflare to be deciding which websites people should be allowed to read.
Prince says that when the Southern Poverty Law Center—one of the leading groups pushing to take down the Daily Stormer—says, "here's the next site that you should take down, I will say, 'dear SPLC, meet Cindy Cohn over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you guys should have a conversation, tell us what we should do.'"
Cohn is the executive director of the digital civil liberties group and was the co-author of a blog post defending free speech in the wake of Cloudflare's Daily Stormer controversy. Prince is working to develop relationships with digital rights groups like EFF and New America so that he gets more "air cover" the next time he faces pressure to censor controversial content. Vocal support from groups like EFF and New America, he hopes, will cause major Cloudflare customers to think twice before pressuring the company to get into the censorship business.
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