Post by High Priestess on Sept 13, 2017 15:04:58 GMT
This article about censorship in the New York Times (my favorite news source) is enlightening and raises serious concerns:
www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/cloudflare-daily-stormer-charlottesville.html
www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/cloudflare-daily-stormer-charlottesville.html
Because of the precise nature of Cloudflare’s business, and the scarcity of competitors, its role in censoring internet speech is not just new, it’s terrifying.
What makes Cloudflare an essential part of the internet is its ability to block malicious traffic from barraging clients’ websites with requests that take them offline. Cloudflare is one of the very few companies in the world that provide this kind of reliable protection. So, if you don’t want your website to get taken down by extortionists, jokers, political opposition or hackers, you have to hire Cloudflare or one of its very few competitors.
But the fewer choices you have for the infrastructure you need to stay online, the more serious the consequences when companies refuse service to you. This is why Cloudflare’s decision to drop The Daily Stormer is so significant. Denying security service to one Nazi website seems fine now, but what if Cloudflare started suspending service for a political candidate that its chief executive didn’t like?
With this move, Cloudflare is wading into the business of evaluating the content of its clients — something sites like Facebook and Twitter have been wrestling with for years, leading them to develop complex rules and procedures that govern what users are and are not allowed to post. Most agree that it’s appropriate for social media companies to take down certain kinds of content — that’s how they ensure our newsfeeds aren’t full of pornography or violence. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want that type of content to be able to exist somewhere on the internet. Ensuring that sites like Cloudflare remain content-neutral might be necessary to guarantee that....there’s a case to be made that we should treat Cloudflare more like the police, who are supposed to equally protect all members of the public.
What makes Cloudflare an essential part of the internet is its ability to block malicious traffic from barraging clients’ websites with requests that take them offline. Cloudflare is one of the very few companies in the world that provide this kind of reliable protection. So, if you don’t want your website to get taken down by extortionists, jokers, political opposition or hackers, you have to hire Cloudflare or one of its very few competitors.
But the fewer choices you have for the infrastructure you need to stay online, the more serious the consequences when companies refuse service to you. This is why Cloudflare’s decision to drop The Daily Stormer is so significant. Denying security service to one Nazi website seems fine now, but what if Cloudflare started suspending service for a political candidate that its chief executive didn’t like?
With this move, Cloudflare is wading into the business of evaluating the content of its clients — something sites like Facebook and Twitter have been wrestling with for years, leading them to develop complex rules and procedures that govern what users are and are not allowed to post. Most agree that it’s appropriate for social media companies to take down certain kinds of content — that’s how they ensure our newsfeeds aren’t full of pornography or violence. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want that type of content to be able to exist somewhere on the internet. Ensuring that sites like Cloudflare remain content-neutral might be necessary to guarantee that....there’s a case to be made that we should treat Cloudflare more like the police, who are supposed to equally protect all members of the public.